DO you rely on a caffeine kick to sharpen you up in the morning? For premature infants, a dose of the drug may be even more important, by helping them to breathe.
Doctors have long prescribed caffeine to premature babies because it appears to protect against apnoea, a condition in which breathing repeatedly stops for more than 15 seconds. This has set them wondering what else a shot of caffeine might do, and to find out, Arne Ohlsson at the University of Toronto, Canada, and his colleagues set up a trial involving more than 2000 premature babies, mostly born at around 27 weeks of pregnancy. Half received caffeine, first intravenously and then through their feeding tubes.
Babies given no caffeine had a 47 per cent risk of an illness called bronchopulmonary dysplasia, which is characterised by inflammation and scarring in the lungs. Premature babies are at greater risk because of the pressure placed on their lungs by medical ventilators. Babies given caffeine could be taken off ventilator systems about a week earlier and had only a 36 per cent risk of the disease (The New England Journal of Medicine, vol 354, p 211).
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