Talk:Adaptation to extrauterine life

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Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 16:52, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

Lung liquid

When I first came across this article, it stated "At birth, the baby's lungs are filled with fetal lung fluid (which is not amniotic fluid) and are not inflated." The part about amniotic fluid was precisely contradicted by the About.com page cited for that statement, so at the time, I changed it to reflect what the source actually said. (Specifically, the About.com page, which was tagged as having been reviewed by a medical doctor, said, "At birth, the baby's lungs are filled with amniotic fluid and are not inflated.")

A non-logged-in user later undid my change, and after doing some brief sampling of available literature on the Web, I now see why -- some fairly authoritative-seeming sources in texts intended for experts say that fetal lung fluid is discharged into the amniotic fluid, but is indeed not the same, and moreover its rate of release into the amniotic fluid can be judged by its contribution to the concentration of certain components in the amniotic fluid. E.g.:

The fetal lung is filled with a volume of liquid (20 to 30 ml/kg) equal to the functional residual capacity. This fluid is not amniotic fluid but, rather, a liquid that has been produced in the lung and discharged through the larynx and mouth into the amniotic fluid. Lung fluid is continuously produced at a rate of approximately 2 to 4 ml/kg/hr. The movement oflung fluid and its components (notably lecithin) into amniotic fluid, the lecithin-sphingomyelin (L/S) ratio has become a notable clinical tool.

— Sandra L. Gardner, Mary Enzman Hines, and Michael Nyp, "Respiratory Diseases". Chapter 23 of Merenstein & Gardner's Handbook of Neonatal Intensive Care (8th ed.), edited by Sandra Lee Gardner, Brian S. Carter, Mary Enzman-Hines, and Jacinto A. Hernandez. (c) 2016 Elsevier. ISBN:978-0-323-32083-2. p. 567

(A preview is available via Google Books.)

I've updated the About.com source page to an archived copy, because it has suffered link rot while still being used as a reference in another couple of places in this WP article, but perhaps a better source should be found, given the apparent incorrect conflation problem on this point? (Unfortunately, the same text (intended for laypeople) that previously existed on About.com is reprinted at many hospitals' sites with the same apparent inaccurate statement intact, a Web search shows.)

-- Undomelin (talk) 23:26, 25 January 2016 (UTC)