Gastric Lipase Enhanced Nasogastric Tube Study in Neonates

The newborn infants who are sick and those who are born prior to due date (preterm) are admitted to the neonatal unit. These babies are unable to feed through their mouth, so a special tube is passed through their nose to the stomach, nasogastric (NG) tube) to provide milk feeds. The bedside nurse inserts the tube and then aspirate some of the fluid from the stomach. As the stomach normally produce acid, these aspirate is then tested on a colour coded paper strip to check if the fluid is acidic. However, on many occasions this test is not very clear. This could be due to misplacement of the tube or the stomach in a newborn not being able to produce enough acid. This then leads to re-siting of another tube and following the same procedure. Sometimes the clinical team may like to do an X Ray to check the position of the tube resulting in unnecessary exposure to radiation. The study will use a special chemical added to the currently existing paper test strip which the investigators believe will enhance the capability of detecting the correct position of the NG tube. This idea has been tested in adults and found to have increased the sensitivity of the test strip significantly. Based on the adult study the study will require to test 233 babies to see if this increases the sensitivity of correct NG tube placement. Parents of all babies who requires an NG tube for milk feeds will be approached and after appropriate consent could be recruited to the study. Babies who are clinically very unstable, moribund and those with diagnosis of bowel obstruction will be excluded from the study.