ABSTRACT
First described in 1967 by Northway and colleagues (1), bronchopulmonary dysplasia (BPD) remains the most prevalent and one of the most serious of the long-term sequelae of preterm birth. Improvements in neonatal intensive care that have reduced mortality among even the most preterm infants have not been accompanied by diminished occurrence of BPD. This chronic lung disease of prematurity primarily, but not exclusively, affects infants who have been treated with mechanical ventilation for surfactant deficiency or structural lung immaturity and its prevalence is highest among extremely preterm and very low birth weight infants. With an average BPD rate of 23% among infants whose birth weights are below 1500 g (2), at the current U.S. annual birth rate of approximately 4.1 million, 1.49% of whom are born below 1500 g (3), greater than 14,000 infants born each year in the United States are destined to develop BPD.
