The Cochrane Neonatal Group works on producing and updating Cochrane Reviews to provide comprehensive data based on the latest evidence about the care of babies and infants. In December 2023, they added to their more than 450 reviews with one on the position used to perform spinal taps. Here are two co-authors of the review, Marcus Glenton Prescott from St. Olav’s Hospital, Trondheim in Norway and Sara Pessano from Gaslini Children's Hospital in Genoa Italy, to tell us about the findings.

What are the risks and benefits of different positions for spinal taps in infants?

Cochrane produces systematic reviews which are recognized as the highest standard in evidence-based health care resources. Listen to Cochrane review authors explain in plain language the evidence and findings of their high-impact reviews. In 5 minutes or less, healthcare professionals to patients and families can understand the latest trusted evidence to help make better informed decisions.

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Pregnant women are sometimes given vaccines to help protect the health of their babies after birth, with Cochrane reviews examining the evidence on this for, for example, pneumococcal disease and hepatitis B. In May 2024, we published a new addition, looking at RSV vaccination. In this podcast, review authors, Emily Phijffer and Odette de Bruin, medical doctors and PhD students in respectively, Pediatrics and Obstetrics at the Wilhelmina Childrens Hospital, University Medical Centre Utrecht in the Netherlands, talk about their findings.

Does respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) vaccination during pregnancy reduce RSV-related hospitalisations in infants?

Patient understanding can be key to the successful use of many of the interventions for which there are Cochrane Reviews and, in November 2023, we published a review that might help with this. Here are two of the authors, Angela Aldin from Cochrane Haematology and Annika Baumeister from the University of Bonn, both in Germany, to talk about the findings of that review looking at interventions for improving health literacy in migrants.

What are the benefits and risks of health literacy interventions for migrants?

Alongside its many reviews of possible treatments for dementia, the Cochrane Dementia and Cognitive Improvement Group produced reviews relevant to other aspects of the care of people with dementia. In this podcast, Tanja Richter talks with Julia Lühnen (Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin, corporate member of Freie Universität Berlin and Humboldt Universität zu Berlin, Institute of Clinical Nursing Science, Berlin, Germany) about the August 2023 update of the 2012 review of psychosocial interventions for reducing the use of antipsychotic medicines for people with dementia living in care homes.

Can psychosocial interventions reduce antipsychotic medication in care home residents?

The question of whether and how to treat preterm infants with postnatal corticosteroids for the management of bronchopulmonary dysplasia, which is a chronic lung problem due to prematurity, has been a neonatologist's quandary for decades. In August 2023, Cochrane Neonatal published a network meta-analysis on the use of postnatal corticosteroids for its prevention. In this podcast, Roger Soll of Cochrane Neonatal, talks with the lead author Susanne Hay, an attending neonatologist at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in the US, about her team's work.

What are the benefits and risks of different corticosteroid treatments delivered intravenously for the prevention of bronchopulmonary dysplasia in infants born prematurely?

Two of the Cochrane Reviews that investigate different ways to deliver health and social care services look at the qualitative and quantitative research into a strategy called hospital at home. In this podcast, Roses Parker, Cochrane’s Commissioning Editor talks with lead author of the March 2024 qualitative evidence synthesis of implementing hospital at home, Jason Wallis, a physiotherapist and researcher at Monash University in Australia, and Sasha Shepperd, researcher at Oxford Population Health, University of Oxford in the UK who led the Cochrane review of the quantitative effects of admission avoidance hospital at home, which was updated in March 2024.

What are the risks and benefits of different positions for spinal taps in infants?

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