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. 2021 Feb 26;22:71. doi: 10.1186/s12931-020-01585-9

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© The Author(s) 2021

Open AccessThis article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated in a credit line to the data.

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Fig. 1 — Differences in the anatomy of the pharynx and larynx of an adult (left) and an infant (right) and their effect on the pathway of aerosol particles (represented by pink dots). Premature infants receive nebulization while lying in a cot or in an incubator (upper panel) whereas nebulization is normally administered to adults with the patient in a seated or erect position (lower panel). Thus, the anatomical differences between adult and neonate are compared for a lying down position in Fig. 1. This graphic highlights the main differences that make the pathway of aerosol particles more curvy in premature infants, potentially reducing the effective delivery of nebulized substance to the lungs.