[Estimation of the degree of metabolism-energy maturity in the premature newborn infant: plasma lipid profile and lipid transport systems].

The newborn preterm infant loses the opportunity to store energy as triacylglycerides form in the adipose tissue during the last quarter of gestation, so they have a real threat to maintain with exogenous supports only the high energy request, and they have been exposed to an elevated risk for central nervous system damage. Small reserves of substrates and poor metabolic adaptation may make the premature infant more vulnerable to the normal stresses of birth and the early postnatal period. We have studied the changes in plasma lipids profile and plasma lipoprotein cholesterol distribution in cord blood from 109 term newborn infants and 16 newborn infants have got higher plasma lipid concentrations than term newborn infants (total cholesterol: 76.81 +/- 4.67 mg/dl (mean +/- SEM) vs 66.72 +/- 1.54 mg/dl, p less than 0.02; Phospholipids: 136.00 +/- 5.24 mg/dl vs 113.94 +/- 2.86 mg/dl, p less than 0.005) and a different cholesterol lipoprotein distribution compared to normal full-term infants, standing out in premature babies, that cholesterol is essentially joint with low density lipoproteins (LDLc: 42.40 +/- 3.62 mg/dl vs 28.76 +/- 1.16 mg/dl, p less than 0.01). These results could be the expression of a metabolic-enzymatic fetal mechanism to keep up a good cholesterol and phospholipids biodisponibility to supply the structural tissues needs in this fetal stages of rapid growth and development.