The Pros And Cons Of Using Steroids

Hearing the word, steroids brings up the image of bodybuilders and athletes abusing the use of steroids to make them stronger. Although there is a bad connotation about people using steroids, premature babies receive steroids to improve their lungs. Steroids given to premature babies are not the same steroids that athletes and adults may use. The main types of steroids that are given to premature babies include betamethasone and dexamethasone, a type of corticosteroids, which are used to raise the survival rate of premature babies, rather than harm them. According to Farlex, in the medical dictionary, corticosteroids are synthetic or fake forms of hormones, helping balance the salt and water in a person’s body. Premature babies are babies who

With this, one of the pros of using steroids is that it reduces the bleeding the patient's brain when they are born (Digitale). Brain hemorrhage, bleeding in the brain, is fairly common for premature babies after experiencing RDS, this makes it important for the babies to have surfactant injected into them so that they will have a higher chance of living. Correspondingly, a majority of the neonates have intraventricular hemorrhage because of the preterm premature rupture in the membrane, which is when the mother’s water breaks earlier than the due date, causing a premature birth. Reuters Health Medical News states the improvement of premature infants living because the antenatal steroid that is given to them, reduces the bleeding in the brain. As a pediatrics science writer, Digitale acknowledges, since the 1980’s, the chances of intraventricular hemorrhage have declined in babies, due to the increase in technology to help scientist with the tests they experiment, and the importance of health to care for preemies has also improved. Furthermore, not using steroids, will result in a damage in nerve cells, increasing the chances of the baby dying prematurely. Betamethasone is another type of steroid that is not given to the baby directly, but to the mother, to prevent further complications after the baby is born prematurely. If a doctor is informed that the mother is in preterm labor,

Getting NEC is preventable if it is treated properly. Hypoglycemia is also related to NEC because it is when the infant has low glucose levels in their bodies, meaning they aren’t getting enough nutrients they need. In the U.S. National Library of Medicine, Bortolin, one of the researchers, conducted an experiment to test intraperitoneal hydrocortisone on rats who were pregnant. This study justifies the importance of steroids favoring the improvement of the immature bowel movement by the results that were given at the end. Statistics exemplifies in the U.S. National Library of Medicine that the mortality rate decreased by fifty percent, juxtaposed to the other group that was not given steroids to the pregnant rats. This is a significant percentage highlighting that steroids are better than they are normally portrayed. Travers, a pediatrician in Birmingham, Alabama, was in a cohort study to test the efficiency of antenatal corticosteroid on premature babies. The test consisted of a proportionate amount of the corticosteroid to give to half the study that they were testing on. In the results given by Travers, the steroids had a lower rate of getting necrotizing enterocolitis at stage two, potentially increasing the rate of survival for babies born at low gestations. There are many factors to steroids being used for