Quick Literature Updates Episode 13

Hello, pediatric surgery family. I'm M. Godi, a research fellow from Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center. And today our team is going to deliver the articles that you should know about. We have three papers today. Two of them are from the Journal of Pediatric Surgery. And the one in the middle is from Pediatric Critical Care Medicine. We don't have much time, so let's start. Our first paper titled Novel index to estimate the cephalocaudal extent of the excavation in Pectus Excavatum. The Titanic index by Belio Monson et al. This paper is summarized by Ellen Cisco. She was a research fellow at Cincinnati Children's, and as of July, she's back to being a general surgery resident at Mayo Clinic. In this article, the authors introduce a new index for patients with Pectus Excavatum. The indices that are currently primarily used are the Haller index and the correction index, and they tell us about the severity of the deformity. This new index, or the Titanic index as they're calling it, takes into account the extent of the deformity. Essentially, it's the percentage of the sternum that lies behind the anterior costal line as seen on CT scans. So the authors did a retrospective review of patients at their institution in Argentina who had undergone minimally invasive repair of Pectus Excavatum and calculated all these indices. They found a weak correlation between the Titanic index and the other indices, but also they found the Titanic index might be more helpful for helping determine how many bars that patients going to need for repair. The threshold they established here was 66.5%, meaning that patients with a higher Titanic index than that probably needed more than two bars. Awesome. Our second paper is Early peritoneal dialysis and postoperative outcomes in infants after pediatric cardiac surgery, a systematic review and meta analysis by Nemachiyama et al. And this paper is summarized by Alex Halpern. He's one of our contributors here at StayCurious MD, and a general surgery resident at George Washington University. They ended up including five studies in their meta analysis. They found that early initiation of peritoneal dialysis was associated with a decreased post-op mortality. They also found that early initiation of peritoneal dialysis shortened duration of mechanical ventilation and shortened length of stay in the ICU. So it seems that early initiation of peritoneal dialysis may benefit infants after pediatric cardiac surgery. Now moving to the last paper of the day. Pediatric Button Battery ingestion, a single center experience and risk score to predict severe outcomes by Skiles et al. This one is summarized by Cecilia Higena. She's a research fellow at Cincinnati Children's. This is a retrospective study done in Boston Children's Hospital from 2008 to 2021. And their aim was to propose a risk score to predict severe outcomes in patients with a button battery ingestion. They analyzed 143 patients. Of them, 24 had severe outcomes. And they found three independent predictors for severe outcomes. The first was the location of the button battery in the esophagus. Second, a button battery larger than 2 centimeters. And third, having symptoms at presentation. Thank you for listening. Please check the link in the description below to read each paper. We hope you like this episode. Please follow StayCurious MD on social media. Give us a rating and subscribe to YouTube channel. And don't forget to download the StayCurious app on the App Store or Play Store for tons of content.