Evaluation of Lactate Dehydrogenase as Decision Support for Admissions to Neonatal Ward

The immediate newborn period is the period of highest morbidity in life. Early signs of serious disease are often vague and difficult to interpret for the non- specialist. Screening lists of clinical signs are useful but have unsatisfactory specificity or sensitivity, cover only one or two diseases, and are complicated to handle in low resource settings. In critically ill newborns, organ failure to one or multiple organ systems is frequently seen due to inadequate circulation to the tissues. Critical disease will cause hypoxia ischemia of the cells in the affected organs followed by energy deficiency. Independently of the condition causing the energy deficiency this will start a series of events, which initially cause a leaking cell membrane leading to that intracellular components, i.e. the enzyme Lactate dehydrogenase (LDH), will leak out into the blood. Previous research in newborns suggests that LDH is a clinically interesting early predictor of serious illness and may thus serve as an important complement to the clinical examination. If the LDH level is elevated the health care personnel will realize that something is wrong and call for appropriate measures. Today LDH analysis is performed at the Dept. of Clinical Chemistry with an inexpensive and accurate method. However, this method needs relatively large blood volumes and the delay between blood sampling and results is rather long, often several hours. In addition LDH is sensitive to hemolysis, which is quite common in blood sampling in newborns. When this is detected at the laboratory a new sample will be needed, thus delaying the result even more. Also, smaller health care facilities rarely have the laboratory equipment needed for the analysis of LDH. The Swedish company Calmark Sweden AB is now launching a point-of-care technology for LDH analysis called "Hilda Neo". LDH is analyzed on an easy-to-use consumable test card together with an "App" on an ordinary smartphone (in the planned study, iPhone 4S)