Routine diagnosis of fetal lung maturity.

The respiratory distress syndrome (RDS) is the most frequent postnatal complication of prematurity having a 25% lethal outcome even today (KEUTH [6]). The same author reports that RDS affects 8% of an unselected population of premature infants and 20% of a negatively selected population found in clinical departments for premature babies. Hence avoidance of prematurity is one of the most important tasks of modern perinatal medicine [12], In those cases in which prematurity is unavoidable, the methods of assessing the maturity of the lungs are becoming more and more numerous [5], e. g. by determining the lecithins content of the amniotic fluid. Our recent investigations show that there is a positive correlation between the lecithins content of tracheal secretion and that of the amniotic fluid [4], Different authors have put forward methods for determining lung maturity that are of variable effectiveness (for review see [7]). The work presented here suggests practical procedures for the routine diagnosis of lung maturity which can be used to evaluate a decrease in lecithins content in amniotic fluid and relate it to respiratory disturbances.