Innovative noninvasive baby reflux monitor

20 May 2011

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Acid reflux is a painful nuisance for most who suffer symptoms such as heartburn, but it can lead to pneumonia and worse for infants. Just detecting it – often by inserting a tube through the nose into the esophagus – can be traumatic.

 
A prototype monitor is taped to an infant's chest, together with a conventional catheter inserted into the nose and esophogus, to compare precision in detecting acid reflux. Photo by G.L. Kohuth

But Michigan State University neonatologist Ira Gewolb is testing a far less invasive diagnostic method he developed for babies, supported by a university technology commercialisation partnership.

Preemies and their parents are accustomed to invasive procedures, Gewolb said, ''but if you try to put a tube down a one-and-a-half-year-old's nose for 24 hours, it's not a pretty picture.'' X-rays often are used instead, he added, but aren't always reliable.

Gewolb and laboratory associate Frank Vice are refining a prototype for a neonatal gastroesophageal reflux monitor based on a common engineering instrument, the accelerometer. Taped to an infant's chest, it picks up low-frequency sound as reflux backs up from the stomach into the esophagus.

More than half of newborns suffer from acid reflux, ranging in severity ''from the happy spitters to the scrawny screamers'' who resist feeding, Gewolb said, but the vast majority outgrow it after they start to sit up. Ex-preemies are especially susceptible, however, and often go home with medications that themselves have side effects. He hopes the monitor, being tested currently at Sparrow Hospital's neonatology unit, ultimately can be approved for use in preemies as well as older infants and even certain adults.

Gewolb, chief of the Division of Neonatology in the MSU College of Human Medicine, is one of seven MSU faculty inventors winning technology transfer grants this year from the Michigan Initiative for Innovation & Entrepreneurship and a predecessor program.

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