August 13, 1999

Healthy children are born every day at the MGH with relative ease, but sometimes infants enter this world in distress and require the extra help of modern technology, coupled with the life-saving skills of MGH staff. One of the inventions that helps save full-term newborn patients whose heart or lungs are failing is ECMO (Extracorporeal Membrane Oxygenation) therapy. The ECMO machine, which does the work of the lungs, restores oxygen to the bloodstream and provides a period of "rest" for immature or damaged lungs.

Over the years, hundreds of lives have been saved at the MGH using this therapy. More than 40 of the survivors – mostly newborn and pediatric patients and some adults – recently joined members of the MGH staff to celebrate that survival at a special picnic in Milton, Mass. In its ninth year, the picnic gives patients who were treated with ECMO and their families the opportunity to visit with other "ECMO families," as well as with MGH respiratory therapists, Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) and operating room nursing staff, and the physicians who provided the live-saving therapy and care.

"The respiratory, nursing and physician staffs are repeatedly challenged while caring for patients with illnesses critical enough to require ECMO support," says Pat English of Respiratory Care Services, coordinator of the ECMO program. "There are times during their illnesses that surviving to live healthy lives seems next to impossible. Seeing so many of the ECMO survivors at the picnic, laughing and enjoying life, makes being a part of the clinical team so rewarding."

Maureen Logue, RN, of the NICU, adds that the annual picnic is a special event for everyone. "The picnic is an opportunity for families to share their experiences as well as for other families and staff to see how well the children are doing year after year."

ECMO therapy was first introduced to the MGH in 1970 to treat severe adult respiratory failure, which at the time, proved ineffective. A decade later, Robert Bartlett, MD, a cardiothoracic surgeon in Irvine, Calif., showed that the therapy could be beneficial in treating certain types of neonatal respiratory failure. Through his efforts, a large network of hospitals collected extensive neonatal research to prove the therapy's benefits to full-term newborns with respiratory failure.

In 1988, ECMO therapy was reintroduced to the MGH for the treatment of newborn respiratory failure. As the management of respiratory failure has evolved, the therapy has been extended again to both children and adults with acute cardiac or pulmonary conditions.