Aim This study assessed possible reasons for the increasing incidence of retinopathy of prematurity (ROP) since mid‐2015 at our institution. Methods Retrospective analysis of all preterm infants born July 2013 to June 2017 with a gestational age (GA) <29 completed weeks admitted to the neonatal intensive care unit at the University Hospital Zurich during the first 28 days of life. The primary outcome measures were severest ROP stage. Statistical analysis was performed using generalised additive models in R. Results During the study period, survival increased in extremely preterm infants. Significant predictors for severest ROP stage were GA, days of mechanical ventilation and multiple gestation (P = .0322). A composite of severe comorbidities had no significant effect on severest ROP stage. GA was identified as the only significant risk factor the for severest ROP stage (P = .0045). Conclusion Increased survival rate of extremely preterm infants was associated with an increased incidence of ROP at our institution. Despite the increase, the incidence is still very low compared with other countries. No other additive factors were identified.

There is widespread use of dietary supplements, some prescribed but many taken without a physician’s guidance. There are many potential interactions between supplements and both over-the-counter and prescription medications in ways that are unknown to patients. Structured medical records do not adequately document supplement use; however, unstructured clinical notes often contain extra information on supplements. We studied a group of 377 patients from three healthcare facilities and developed a natural language processing (NLP) tool to detect supplement use. Using surveys of these patients, we investigated the correlation between self-reported supplement use and NLP extractions from the clinical notes. Our model achieved an F1 score of 0.914 for detecting all supplements. Individual supplement detection had a variable correlation with survey responses, ranging from an F1 of 0.83 for calcium to an F1 of 0.39 for folic acid. Our study demonstrated good NLP performance while also finding that self-reported supplement use is not always consistent with the documented use in clinical records.