Bronchopulmonary Dysplasia in Adulthood

Abstract

The development of techniques for the mechanical ventilation of patients with respiratory failure must count as one of the major advances in medical therapy in the past 40 years. During the 1960s, knowledge about how the lung works was translated into improved forms of technology for ventilatory support of patients with lung disease. By the end of that decade, these techniques had been applied to infants; newborn intensive care units were established, in large part to care for prematurely born infants with hyaline membrane disease or respiratory distress syndrome. Pulmonary surfactant had been described,¹ and the association between a lack . . .