#434 - 📑 Journal Club - The Complete Episode from April 18th 2026

Send us Fan Mail

The AAP has weighed in on therapeutic hypothermia for HIE, and Daphna walks through the clinical report in full. The core eligibility criteria haven't moved — but the edges have gotten more nuanced. Late initiation, the 35-week zone, mild HIE, sentinel events, MRI timing, and feeding during cooling are all addressed.

Also this week: a prospective pilot from Australia tests whether adding bedside ultrasound to plain radiography improves surgical risk stratification in NEC. The X-ray-only model couldn't separate the clusters. The combined model produced a more than six-fold difference in odds of surgery — complex ascites, absent peristalsis, and abnormal bowel perfusion did the heavy lifting.

Daphna then covers F-NeoBright, a small but compelling feasibility study testing intranasal fresh breast milk in infants with moderate to severe HIE. Ten babies, high adherence, no safety signals, and parents administering doses at home.

Ben rounds out Journal Club with the two-year follow-up of the CALI trial examining outcomes after early caffeine plus LISA versus CPAP alone. Mortality trended toward LISA. The statistics didn't get there — but the direction held.

The week closes with Ben and Eli on the Guttmacher Institute study linking restrictive abortion laws to higher maternal mortality across two decades of US data.

Support the show

As always, feel free to send us questions, comments, or suggestions to our email: [e-mail]. You can also contact the show through Instagram or Twitter, @nicupodcast. Or contact Ben and Daphna directly via their Twitter profiles: @drnicu and @doctordaphnamd. The papers discussed in today's episode are listed and timestamped on the webpage linked below.

Enjoy!