What is DEXTA?
Babies born early sometimes need specialised neonatal care to ensure their wellbeing. As part of this care, babies will receive additional support with their breathing, which is given using a breathing machine called a ventilator, this can be painful and babies are given pain relief using morphine.
Morphine relieves pain and keeps babies comfortable, but some studies have shown that large doses of morphine can have side effects, such as delay feeding, slowing breathing, extending time in intensive care, and it may have a harmful impact on brain development and behaviour in later childhood. We are, therefore, investigating other medicines that could relieve pain in babies so that we can keep babies pain free with smaller amounts of morphine and reduce its harmful effects.
One such medicine is dexmedetomidine (short for dexmed) which is used for pain relief in children and adults, with smaller studies using dexmed in babies. These studies suggest that dexmed could relieve pain with fewer side effects and be better for brain development.
The purpose of DEXTA is to investigate, in ventilated preterm babies, if one of two different doses of dexmed, given in addition to the usual dose of morphine, reduces the amount of morphine needed to keep the baby pain free and reduces the adverse effects of morphine.