BU Research Blog

Dr Simon Dyall’s Lipid Neurochemistry lab conducts research investigating the therapeutic neuroprotective potential of bioactive lipids. The latest study is a collaboration with Dr Laura de Rooy, Consultant Neonatologist at St George’s Hospital, London, the University of Roehampton and Bournemouth University, and has just been published in the journal, Clinical Nutrition.

Recent advances in neonatal care have led to improved survival rates for preterm infants, but this has led to greater challenges in providing these survivors with adequate nutrition. Docosahexaenoic acid (DHA) and arachidonic acid (ARA) are dietary fats essential for optimal brain growth and development. During the last trimester the placenta provides the foetus with high levels of DHA and ARA and extremely preterm infants, born at less than 28 weeks, are therefore at the greatest risk of deficiency as this supply has been cut short. In this new study the DHA and ARA intakes of extremely preterm infants was measured from all sources over the first six weeks of life and compared to European intake guidelines and levels provided in utero.

The study extends earlier observations with a more detailed analysis that current feeding practices for extremely preterm infants are likely to lead to severe deficits in DHA, but importantly the study measured ARA intake for the first time, where the results show that deficits of ARA are of a potentially much greater magnitude.

“These observations are really important as we need to ensure that these infants receive the best nutrition to decrease morbidity and improve long-term outcomes. These low levels of intake occurred in spite of the infants receiving breast-milk and the results highlight the need to provide extremely premature infants with additional sources of DHA and ARA.” says Dr Dyall.

Follow-up work is currently underway investigating how intakes of DHA and ARA can be increased to compensate for these early deficits. If you would further information on this research or any of the work undertaken by the Lipid Neurochemistry lab please contact Dr Simon Dyall, sdyall@bournemouth.ac.uk

Reference:

De Rooy, L. and Hamdallah, H. Dyall, S.C. (2016): Extremely preterm infants receiving standard care receive very low levels of arachidonic and docosahexaenoic acids. Clinical Nutrition

The paper can be found at: http://authors.elsevier.com/sd/article/S0261561416312778