When babies come too early to the world, they have a higher risk for lung problems. The organs ripen quite late in the pregnancy and are not therefore designed for early birth sometimes completely.
It is also a five-month-old preemie in Denmark: It needs to be treated due to lung problems at the University hospital of Odense. First of all, it is in Pediatrics, and later the Baby must be laid on the children’s intensive care unit.
The blood values of the small patients are regularly monitored, this is Routine.
A few days previously, the value was still unremarkable
In the case of the test results a value, it is striking that The zinc concentration in the blood is 20.2 micromol per Liter, slightly above the normal range of ten to 19. The surprise of the competent children, the doctors especially, because the value was five days ago – as the child is still in the pediatric 11.6 is significantly lower and completely normal.
The Doctors keep the unusual measured value in the view, two days later, you take again a sample of your blood. Now the zinc value is even higher, at 42.4 micromol per Liter.
How can that be?
The Doctors check all medications and vitamin supplements, the gets the Baby. None of them contains relevant amounts of zinc. Whether to test the preparations of all once, after asking the competent laboratory. It could be that one of them contained due to a failure of zinc. The pediatricians hold this analysis, first of all, is unnecessary.
Search for clues in the laboratory
Check, but to the security, whether in the laboratory in the analysis of the blood sample, a mistake could be. The colleague that carried out the measurement, can remember this sample explicitly. Because elevated zinc values are so rare, they had carried out the analysis a second Time, to a measurement error to exclude: The result was, therefore, correct.
Can be run at the time of blood sampling something wrong – and the zinc in this procedure, the sample to be reached? Both in Pediatrics as well as on the children’s intensive care is taken with babies, the blood from the small vessels on the heel. Maybe the employees have applied there zinc on the wound, and the measured values distorted? No, that was not the case, the Competent.
A conversation with the mother dissolves, finally, the puzzle of how the Team of Eva Rabing Brix Petersen in the journal “Biochemica Medica,” reported that: in Order to speed up the healing of wounds on the heel, had applied to the mother an ointment. And zinc oxide is contained in addition to E Vitamin. The zinc is not circled, so in the baby’s blood, but actually came at the time of sampling in the sample.
Three days later, the Doctors take a blood sample from the other foot, the mother has no ointment is applied. The zinc value is 14.3 micromol per Liter in the normal range.
“If something appears to be wrong, then it is often wrong”, they write in conclusion in your case report.
