Don't we all wish we had the technology to individually tailor mom's own milk for those 
micropremies!  

I guess I spent too much time (and not enough in other ways) around all those biochemical 
nutritionists who had all those cool toys that cost tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars to 
buy and came with high maintenance fees & expensive chemicals. So, it was not unusual to sit 
through their presentations of their master's and doctoral dissertation work where there was in 
detail analysis of all sorts of precursors and metabolites of various different nutrients.  I did get to 
work with an iodine autoanalyser which was primitive in comparison and back in the day of my 
brief genetics work - one of those ultracentrifuges that can walk through walls if misbalanced.

But to respond to Nancy, I was actually not thinking that they had done an individual analysis, but 
rather a "pooled" analysis of their premie donor moms.  Again, there is a whole statistical art to 
pooled analysis of biological samples.  It can be extremely useful in huge population studies.  
Cornell had this huge program collecting tons of data on biochemical samples for nutrition 
analysis in China that used such "pooled techniques".  I'm having nightmarish visions of those 
incomprehensible statistical formulae dancing through my head right now.  For a tried and true 
statistician as opposed to someone with a background in epidemiology these are not really 
difficult techniques.  The statisticians who worked on this for the Cornell biochemical nutritions 
originally worked on statitics for agricultural plots, believe it or not, and applied it to nutrition.  
For that reason, I had to struggle with terminology used by the agricultural statisticians when I 
went to CDC and had to learn their "language" for the same statistical tests.

Anyway, it seems to me that pooled analysis of samples would be a great way to determine the 
"average"  of these nutrients in a way that wouldn't be overly costly.  Far more affordable than any 
individual analysis at this point in time.  Now, clearly I have also been watching too much CSI, 
because I want to go back and examine the trace evidence.  I'm sure by now, those samples of 
milk are history.

So, I hope I got this right.  It is a reasonable speculation that iit could very well be that the protein 
and calorie content of the "donor milk" was not sufficiently "premature" to meet the needs of these 
tiny babies.  Is that the gist?

Best, Susan

It must be clear to you all by know that my PhD really signifies permanent head damage.  I spent 6 
glorious years when this type of discussion was held on a daily basis and I must be missing it right 
now.

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