The prediction of newborn respiratory distress syndrome with pulmonary artery doppler in preterm births

In this study, we think that fetal pulmonary artery Doppler indices, which indirectly leads to indirect evaluation of pulmonary pressure, can be used to predict neonatal RDS indirectly. Therefore, in this study, pulmonary artery doppler examination of neonatal respiratory distress syndrome in preterm delivery was aimed. In this study, which was carried out as a prospective cohort study, 32 preterm babies born from pregnant women who didn't have congenital anomaly and pregnancy complication that gave birth before 37th gestational week in Ege University Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology between July 2018 and December 2018 were included in the study. All patients underwent ultrasound examination to obtain fetal pulmonary artery Doppler by a single experienced specialist. After birth, newborns were grouped according to RDS (+) and RDS (-) as RDS. SPSS 23.0 (SPSS Inc., Chicago, Illinois, USA) program was used for statistical analysis. In all statistical evaluations, α error level was taken as 0.005 and p düzey0.05 was considered significant. At the end of the study, 4 patients had RDS (+) and 28 patients had RDS (-). The mean age of RDS (+) patients was 29.25 ± 8.42 years, and the mean age of patients with RDS (-) was 32.57 ± 4.58 years. There was a statistically significant difference between the mean age of RDS (+) and RDS (-) groups (p <0.05). However, no significant relationship was found between the groups in terms of height, weight, BMI, gravida and parity (p> 0.05). Pulmonary Artery Acceleration Time was 76.01 ± 10.86 sec in RDS (+) group and 70.04 ± 21.92 sec in RDS group. There was a statistically significant difference between the groups (p = 0.002). When evaluated in terms of Pulmonary Artery Ejection Time, it was 233,51 ± 127,58 sec in the RDS (+) group and 244,14 ± 52,14 sec in the RDS (-) group. There was a statistically significant difference between the groups (p = 0.004). When the patient groups were evaluated in terms of PATET, it was 0.38 ± 0.13 in the RDS (+) group and 0.29 ± 0.08 in the RDS (-) group. There was a statistically significant difference between the mean scores of the RDS (+) and RDS (-) groups (p = 0.003). The results of this study showed an inverse correlation between fetal PATET values and the presence of neonatal RDS. Therefore, we suggest that fetal PATET ratio measurement is a highly reliable method with promising, noninvasive, reproducible and acceptable levels of specificity, sensitivity and negative predictive values. Keywords: Preterm Delivery, Doppler Ultrasound, Prenatal Diagnosis, Pulmonary Artery Acceleration to Ejection Time Ratio, Respiratory Distress Syndrome