Chronic lung disease after premature birth.

Copyright © 2007 Massachusetts Medical Society. In 1967, northway et al. first described a new chronic respiratory disease, bronchopulmonary dysplasia, that developed in premature infants exposed to mechanical ventilation and oxygen supplementation.1 Two decades later, the same authors found that clinically significant respiratory symptoms and functional abnormalities persisted into adolescence and early adulthood in a cohort of survivors of bronchopulmonary dysplasia,2 suggesting that lung injuries early in life may have lifelong consequences. Bronchopulmonary dysplasia is now the most common chronic lung disease of infancy in the United States. Today, newborns consistently survive at gestational ages of 23 to 26 weeks — 8 to 10 weeks younger than the infants in whom bronchopulmonary dysplasia was first described. New mechanisms of lung injury have emerged, and the clinical and pathological characteristics of pulmonary involvement have changed profoundly, although its natural history and outcome into adulthood are still largely unknown. It is only now that large populations of persons born prematurely are approaching adulthood, and they may be at increased risk for respiratory disease in adult life.