Treatment of Idiopathic Respiratory Distress with Large Doses of Corticoids

Abstract

The investigations of Reynolds1 and of Naeye, Harcke, and Blanc2 published recently should be considered with great interest. So far, all therapy proposed for idiopathic respiratory distress (RDS) did not prove effective enough to survive a 10-year period. Before we knew the above mentioned studies, we started treating severe RDS in final stages of the disease with extremely high doses of prednisolone intravenously (20 to 40 mg/kg/day) with an encouraging success. Five of 10 infants sumvived; of the five who died, three had fatal cerebral bleeding, in two, post-mortem examination could not be performed.