VOA标准英语2012--Caffeine Safely Stimulates Premaure Infants

（单词翻译）

Caffeine Safely Stimulates¹ Premaure Infants

Almost all babies who are born very prematurely³ have trouble breathing. For decades, doctors have treated them with the stimulant⁴ caffeine, even though there was little scientific evidence to justify⁵ it.
Breathing delivers oxygen to the brain, so when an infant's breathing is disrupted, it can have a critical impact on the child's development.
In an earlier stage of this study, some 2,000 premature² babies in nine countries were randomly⁶ assigned to get caffeine or a placebo⁷. At 18 months, researchers found numerous advantages for the caffeine group. Those babies had half as many cases of cerebral⁸ palsy as well as lower rates of blindness, deafness and delayed mental functioning.
Now, University of Pennsylvania researchers report on an additional three and a half years of follow-up, mainly to look for possible safety issues, which might take time to develop.
Lead researcher Barbara Schmidt says the new study confirms the effectiveness of the caffeine treatment, and underscores its lack of side effects.
"Not only is it safe, it is more effective than any other drugs we give to babies in the nursery when they are very preterm," Schmidt says.
There were some changes in the results between the two groups of children at age 18 months and then at five years, notably⁹ that the advantage children treated with caffeine had in mental development seemed to have evaporated.
"There is some residual¹⁰ benefit [to] the quality of the children's motor function - if they had impaired¹¹ motor function - but there is no longer any effect whatsoever¹² on the rates of cognitive¹³ impairment," she says.
Schmidt's research, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, shows rates of cognitive impairment at five years were much lower than at 18 months - what she calls a potential for "remarkable¹⁴ catch-up" in the very premature babies as they get older, whether they get caffeine therapy or not.