[Percutaneous central venous catheters in neonatal intensive care. Personal experience]

The authors describe their own experience about using a siliconed percutaneous central venous catheter in the newborn, experience performed in their neonatal intensive care unit in Beirut. The technique consists in introducing this sort of device centrally by using a peripheral vein. The authors performed a prospective study on thirty-two newborns: Their results seem to indicate, in accordance to the literature review, that this technique offers many advantages such as sparing the newborn veins, prolonged hyperalimentation and treatment, and less incidents than the other perfusion techniques (peripheral and central). Few inconveniences are encountered: limitation of the amount of daily perfusion, impossibility of transfusing blood or derivatives across the silicone catheter.