Skin injuries in newborns hospitalized in neonatal intensive care: a cross-sectional study.
Carolina Tenfen, Grasiely Masotti Scalabrin Barreto, Neide Martins Moreira and 3 others
PMID 39101812WHAT IT FOUND
In a NICU, 74 of 291 newborns had skin injury; 44 had more than one type, mainly dermatitis and pressure injury.
Antibiotics and parenteral nutrition were linked to lesion number, but cause was not shown.
Key findings
01Of 291 hospitalized newborns, 74 had a skin injury, and 44 of them had more than one type of lesion; dermatitis and pressure injury were the main types.
02Antibiotic use and parenteral nutrition were associated with lesion number (p=0.0001 and p=0.0215). Newborns who used antibiotics had up to two lesions, while those who did not use antibiotics had three lesions; newborns who used parenteral nutrition had up to two lesions, while those who did not had three lesions.
03A higher NSCS score was weakly correlated with lower Apgar scores (r=0.309, p=0.0008). Higher scores were associated with shorter hospitalization, lower pain scores and fewer antibiotics, and with longer healing time, higher hemoglobin and hematocrit, and later diet start.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for RNs
Read the rest of this summary
You get three full summaries a month, free, and we do not ask for a card. Search, the TL;DRs and your library stay unlimited either way.
What it does not show
This was a single-centre retrospective record review, so it may not reflect other neonatal units. Only newborns with an NSCS score of 5 or more were included, so milder skin problems may be missed. Nursing notes were incomplete: skin changes were identified by the NSCS but were not described in the nursing evolution. Pain scores were incomplete, so pain information was missing for some newborns with skin lesions. The study did not test any intervention, so it cannot show that skin care practices prevent lesions. The main results report 74 newborns with skin injury, but Table 5 uses N=114 for correlations, so the denominator for some analyses is unclear. Many associations were not statistically significant, and the study does not separate the effects of multiple concurrent NICU interventions.
Declared interests
This study was financed in part by CAPES, Finance Code 001 CAPES-PDPG 88881.691386/2022-01. The supplied text does not report a commercial conflict statement.
The easy way to misread this
Do not read the antibiotic and parenteral nutrition results as proof that these treatments caused skin lesions. The newborns also received invasive and non-invasive NICU interventions, such as asepsis and antisepsis, baths, laboratory tests, dressings, tubes, nasal cannulas, probes, catheters, sensors, diapers, attachments, phototherapy, parenteral nutrition and antibiotics, and the study did not separate their effects.