New breast milk freezer at Mac
[projekktor id=’12377′]
There was an important unveiling Thursday at the McMaster Children’s hospital. It’s a room, containing a walk in freezer, designed especially for breast milk. It’s not milk for all babies, but for infants who had an unexpected early start.
Watching 4-year old Sam McCuen romp around, it’s hard to fathom his rocky start. Sam was born at 25-weeks gestation, 3-months early.
He was one pound, 7 ounces, and about the length of a bag of sugar. Babies born at this stage have a 75 to 80% chance of survival, and often deal with many health issues.
Mary Beth McCuen is Sam’s mom. She says, “for Sam, his breathing was always the major complication. He was on oxygen immediately and on oxygen for several months after he came home.”
Immediately following his birth, experts at Mac’s Neonatal Intensive Care unit made it clear to Mary beth what Sam needed. According to McCuen, “the main goal for Sam in the simplest of terms was for him to grow. If he grew, he would replenish his lung tissue.”
Dr. Christoph Fusch, from McMaster Children’s Hospital, says the best way to achieve that growth is through breast milk. Fusch says, “breast milk has excellent properties in terms of digestibility. It has lots of extra factors in it… growth factors, hormones that are needed and that makes breast milk so unique. That’s why we want to feed it to preemie babies.”
But as nourishing as breast milk is, preemies demand a lot of mother nature’s special formula. Fusch says, “premature babies have much higher growth rates than term babies. Growth rates are 3 times as high, so babies need to get 3-times more calories and 3 times more protein as term babies get.”
In this newly created area of the McMaster children’s hospital, mom’s own milk gets a nutritional boost. Breast milk from mother’s of preemies gets fortified with proteins, lipids and carbohydrates from cow’s milk.
McCuen says her son had the special breast milk for his entire hospital stay. Today, Sam is a perfect example of what can happen when you give nature’s elixir a helping hand.
Though currently the fortification is done with cows milk, it’s hoped researchers will eventually develop better supplements that are more suitable to the preemies sensitive digestive system.
