PERSPECTIVE
Community child health
Balancing biomedical, care, and support needs in the technology dependent child
1 Community Child Health, South Cambridgeshire PCT, Cambridge, UK
2 East Anglia’s Children’s Hospices, Cambridge, UK
Correspondence to:
Correspondence to:
Dr D Vickers
Consultant Community Paediatrician, Ida Darwin, Fulbourn, Cambridge CB1 5EE, UK; david.vickers@southcambs-pct.nhs.uk
Perspective on the paper by Sullivan et al (see page 478)
Keywords: aspiration; cerebral palsy; gastrostomy; respiratory infection
| The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below. |
In this issue, Sullivan et al report on their findings of a study of gastrostomy feeding in children with cerebral palsy.1 This study is part of a larger examination of the impact of this intervention on children. Their key findings are that there is no increase in respiratory morbidity following gastrostomy insertion and indeed a reduced need for antibiotics or hospital admission in the 12 months following the procedure for children with cerebral palsy. As they point out, there are a number of reports in the literature that have suggested the reverse finding, an increase in mortality following gastrostomy. A recent systematic review highlighted the continued paucity of evidence on the risks and benefits of this intervention, in particular noting an excess of deaths in the gastrostomy fed group with cerebral palsy, observing however that this may reflect differing levels of disability in the intervention and control
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