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A research team dedicated to making anaesthesia and surgery safer and more comfortable for babies and children has been awarded an inaugural Byron Kakulas Medal by WA’s Perron Institute.
There is a scarcity of prospective studies investigating the relative roles of skin prick and intradermal testing, serum specific IgE, and extended oral challenges in diagnosing children with reported β-lactam allergies.
This review paper explores the role of human taste panels and artificial neural networks (ANNs) in taste-masking paediatric drug formulations. Given the ethical, practical, and regulatory challenges of employing children, young adults (18-40) can serve as suitable substitutes due to the similarity in their taste sensitivity. Taste panellists need not be experts in sensory evaluation so long as a reference product is used during evaluation; however, they should be screened for bitterness taste detection thresholds.
It is extremely challenging to formulate age-appropriate flucloxacillin medicines for young children, because flucloxacillin sodium (FS) has a lingering, highly bitter taste, dissolves quickly in saliva, and requires multiple daily dosing at relatively large doses for treating skin infections. In this paper, we describe a promising taste-masked flucloxacillin ternary microparticle (FTM) formulation comprising FS, Eudragit EPO (EE), and palmitic acid.
Children are sometimes transported via fixed or rotary wing aircraft for medical care. If they are intubated with a cuffed endotracheal tube (ETT), changes in environmental pressure during transport can alter cuff pressure. Cuff management in this setting varies widely by region and by organization. In this historical review, we sought to delineate the evolution of ETT cuff management in children undergoing aeromedical retrieval in order to progress the field toward an optimum strategy in the future.
Tonsillectomy, a common childhood surgery, is associated with difficult postoperative recovery. Previous reviews provided low-grade evidence that honey may improve recovery. The BEE PAIN FREE study investigated whether honey alongside multimodal analgesia improved the recovery trajectory in children following tonsillectomy.
Cognitive errors are known contributors to poor decision-making in healthcare. However, their incidence and extent of their contribution to negative outcomes during difficult airway management are unknown. We aimed to identify cognitive errors during paediatric difficult airway management using data from the Pediatric Difficult Intubation (PeDI) registry, to determine patient and clinician factors associated with these errors, and their contribution to complications.
Oral liquid prednisolone medications have poor acceptance among paediatric patients due to ineffective masking of the bitterness taste of prednisolone. This study aimed to develop a child-friendly prednisolone tablet using a patented chewable chocolate-based delivery system previously applied successfully to mask the bitterness tastes of midazolam and tramadol.
Tonsillectomy is one of the most common surgical procedures in childhood. While generally safe, it often is associated with a difficult early recovery phase with poor oral intake, dehydration, difficult or painful swallowing, postoperative bleeding, infection and/or otalgia.
Britta Regli-von Ungern-Sternberg AM FAHMS MD, PhD, DEAA, FANZA Chair of Paediatric anaesthesia, University of Western Australia; Consultant