Innovations Treating Baby Jaundice

What is Jaundice?

Jaundice occurs when the body cannot discharge bilirubin, a substance that normally occurs when red blood cells are destroyed. The more the substance develops, the more yellowish is the skin of someone becomes.
In babies who have not yet developed the compounds that allow their bodies to eliminate bilirubin, jaundice is not simply normal, but can also cause permanent damage or even death. 

While first world nations have the innovation and the cash to treat babies, this treatment is often excessively expensive for those developing countries. The yellowness caused by the accumulation of the bile color bilirubin in the blood, influences around 60 percent of babies, and around 5 to 10 percent have jaundice sufficiently to require phototherapy.

Treatmeting Jaundice

The first line of treatment for neonatal jaundice is phototherapy. In addition, the corrective intervention strategy has generally gone away to achieve a positive clinical outcome with the help of phototherapy, without resorting to interventional treatment techniques.

Phototherapy was generally used as part of restorative practice in the 1970s and, according to the information from the American Academy of Pediatrics, more than one million newborn children worldwide have been treated using phototherapy.

Phototherapy refers to the use of light to change the bilirubin atoms in the body into solvent isomers of water that can be discharged by the body through urine and feces. Certain wavelengths of light can change the bilirubin in two different mixtures, called "Lumirubin" and "Photobilirubin". These two chemicals are isomers of bilirubin, which implies that they are made of similar molecules; however, their structures have been modified.

These wavelengths of light can be sent by fluorescent lights and when they penetrate the skin, they change the bilirubin to its isomers, which can be expelled from the body without the intervention of the liver.

Complications In Some parts of the World

In the United States and other nations, this treatment is as basic as putting children under unique UV lights. The light separates the bilirubin, and the problem is completely resolved in a couple of days.

However, in poor nations, phototherapy is often difficult to find. Ultraviolet lights can be excessively expensive, or they break, and nobody has the cash or the skills to repair them. Without this basic treatment, more than 160,000 children go through or experience the ill effects of jaundice each year.

Cost Reduction Solutions 

Researchers from Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology published a recent study in the journal Biomedical Optics Express about the development of a lighting texture with high potential to be used as part of the treatment of neonatal jaundice.  They have developed woven textiles with optically conductive fibers. By using battery LEDs as a light source, the fibers distribute light evenly through the fabric. The material demonstrated a homogenous light force with a variety of only 4% in all the material. 

Fiber Optic Phototherapy

The fabric can be sewn into pajamas or sleeping bag for babies, which allows them to receive treatment while the caregivers embrace and is manufactured so that the light does not shine towards the baby eyes, which means that there is no requirement for the glasses. This technique depends on an ideal combination of optical and mechanical properties of Plastic Optical Fiber i.e."POF" and an immediate innovative generation of material's fabrics. Consequently, a simple industrialization is expected. This photonic tissue could be used as a device for compact phototherapy, which allows treatment at home, in view of the mother or caregivers.

Currently, Stanford specialists, the University of Minnesota and Massey Street Children's Hospital in Lagos, Nigeria, have thought of a low-tech response to the issue. Working in Nigeria, they manufactured and tested special canopies that filter sunlight, becoming a type of phototherapy without the use of electrical energy. The covers were created from plastic films in poor conditions, generally accessible to poor families, these plastic covers channel or filters the wavelengths that can cause sunburn and hyperthermia, allowing only the blue UV wavelengths that treat jaundice to pass.

Since the fragile skin of children is exceptionally prone to sunburn and their bodies have not yet been able to control body temperature in addition to the high skin permeability of water, just putting a baby in daylight conditions would be risky as they might get sunburns or suffer from dehydration. The trial included 447 newborn children at the healing facility in Lagos, Nigeria's biggest city. Infants were haphazardly allotted to either standard phototherapy treatment under shelter.

They got no less than five hours every day of the light presentation. Those getting the sifted daylight treatment were held by their moms and could breastfeed amid the treatment. The outcomes, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, demonstrated the shelter treatment was 93 percent successful, contrasted with 90 percent for standard treatment.

Conclusion

It is hoped that these findings will inspire health officials in impoverished countries to build their own marquees. After further testing the effectiveness of the canopy for babies with severe jaundice, the team plans to launch a public health campaign to get the word out.  Researchers are currently inquiring about approaches to utilize these channels in nurseries or comparative structures to copy this treatment in locales that are breezy, blustery or have other unfriendly climate conditions.