Description
Introduction
Pulmonary hemorrhage is an uncommon event in infants. It has been described most commonly in the sick premature neonate, older child, or adolescent with chronic cardiopulmonary disease. Acute idiopathic pulmonary hemorrhage in previously healthy infants has, to our knowledge, been reported only rarely. During the past 5 years we have successfully treated 4 infants with sever respiratory failure secondary to acute idiopathic pulmonary hemorrhage. Two of these patients were managed with the conventional therapy of mechanical ventilation, while the other two were successfully managed with extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO) after failure of conventional mechanical ventilation. In this report we review the current literature on this unusual pediatric problem and describe the use of ECMO as a modality in supporting patients after an acute pulmonary hemorrhage.