Pediatric Research Podcast

The United Nations recently stated that “climate change is the defining issue of our time, and we are at a defining moment” ( https://www.un.org/en/global-issues/climate-change ). This statement ended the political debate about the role of human activities in climate change. Global climate change is happening and it will have a profound effect on our children. Listen and learn from Dr. Kari N...

Illness severity scores are commonly used for mortality prediction and risk stratification in pediatric critical care research. However, as mortality has steadily declined in the pediatric intensive care unit there has been increasing attention given to evaluating non-mortality outcomes in survivors.  In this episode we meet Early Career Investigator Elizabeth Killien from Seattle C...

This episode, along with a few more to come, involves a conversation with a senior investigator who has had a large and lasting effect in the world of pediatric research. The Early Career Investigator episodes will still be coming once a month, but hopefully this will add a bit of variety to the Pediapod feed and shine a light on some of the pioneers who have helped shape the face of modern Pediat...

Hypoxic Ischaemic Encephalopathy (HIE), a subset of neonatal encephalopathy, is the most common neurological condition in term born infants. It is known that a range of acute and chronic placental pathologies are more common in infants with HIE. However little is known about how differences in utero-placental function might contribute to varied outcomes in these infants. In thi...

The development of children born very preterm is most often evaluated using the Bayley Scales of Infant Development. These single assessments are routinely used as outcome measures for neonatal interventions or as a means of prognosis. However, early Bayley scores may not accurately predict later outcomes.  In this episode of Pediapod, we speak to Dr. Mary Lauren Neel...

The temporal facilitates many complex neurological processes. Alterations to these processes are known to correlate with specific functional deficits commonly found in preterm-born children at and beyond school age. However, as yet there is not an objective, validated method to assess the temporal lobe structure or size in very preterm infants. In this episode of Pediapod, I speak t...

The COVID-19 pandemic severely affected health and healthcare systems worldwide and could have resulted in changes in fetal and neonatal outcomes.   In this episode, we speak to Early Career Investigator, Vivek Shukla from the University of Alabama at Birmingham. Using machine learning techniques, he performed a population-based study to identify changes in fetal and neona...

Before the COVID-19 pandemic, the use of telemedicine was limited in pediatric primary care. Then, in 2020 it increased exponentially. However, early COVID-19 reports described inequities in telemedicine use across multiple specialties. In this episode, we meet Early Career Investigator, Kelsey Schweiberger from the University of Pittsburgh. In a recent paper, she describes the...

Heart rate characteristics and demographic factors have long been used to aid early detection of late-onset sepsis, however respiratory data may contain additional signatures of infection.  In this episode we meet Early Career Investigator Brynne Sullivan from the University of Virginia. She and her team developed machine learning models to predict late-onset sepsis t...

Bronchopulmonary dysplasia (BPD) is the most common morbidity among very preterm infants.  Commonly, nutritional interventions are focused on achieving optimal body weight gain. However, very preterm infants with evolving lung disease often experience disproportionate growth in the neonatal period, which may contribute to the odds of developing BPD. In this episode of Pediapod,...

Kawasaki disease is a common childhood vasculitis and its global incidence appears to be increasing. Although this disease is self-limiting, the associated vasculopathy can cause cardiovascular complications. In this episode of Pediapod, we meet Early Career Investigator Cal Robinson at the Hospital for Sick Children, Toronto, Canada who performed a population-based cohort study usi...

Children with medical complexity typically require multiple medications throughout the course of their treatment. These individuals also increasingly undergo genome-wide testing early in life as a diagnostic test.  Since many medications prescribed to children have established gene-drug interactions, could this genetic data be repurposed to aid precision prescribing in thi...

Neonatal opioid withdrawal syndrome (NOWS) represents a major public health problem in the US with a high socioeconomic burden. The pathophysiology of this condition is not yet fully understood. Data from animal models have shown that opioids modulate brain reward signalling via an inflammatory cascade, however no such data exist for opioid-exposed neonates. In this episode of Pedia...

Rare diseases affect millions of people in the USA. However, access to subspecialty care is not distributed equitably and there may be other barriers to clinic attendance. Furthermore, once established within the genetics clinic, families may still face barriers along the path to getting a molecular diagnosis. In this episode, we meet Early Career Investigator, Monica Wojcik, a neonatologist and g...

Systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) causes significant long-term morbidity and mortality, particularly in children. There is some evidence that the innate immune system, in particular neutrophil activity, can be compromised in adult-onset lupus. Yet there is a paucity of data on neutrophil activity in pediatric SLE.  This month on Pediapod, we join Early Career Investigator, Rakesh Kumar Pilan...

95% of adolescents in the US have access to a smartphone and 45% report being online "almost constantly". Beyond the general time spent on screens, the control over usage and the interference into other activities are also important considerations and could reflect problematic screen use.  This week on Pediapod, we meet Early Career Investigator, Professor Jason Nagata from the...

The Baby Doe Regulations, which regulate the provision of life-sustaining treatment to seriously ill neonates, caused a stir amongst neonatologists when they were first enacted in the 1980s. The fear at the time was that they would restrict their ability to provide optimal care to seriously ill patients by mandating the use of aggressive treatments in all but futile cases, irrespective of a patien...

For depressed preterm neonates, initiating positive pressure ventilation is the most important factor in facilitating transition. Therefore the recommendation for depressed neonates is to immediately cut the umbilical cord and begin resuscitation. However, many studies have shown that delaying the clamping of the umbilical cord also benefits preterm infants by increasing a neon...

Intraventricular hemorrhage (IVH) occurs in around 45% of infants born below 26 weeks gestational age, causing significant lifelong morbidity and mortality. However, there is currently no effective treatment. In part, this is due to the lack of well-characterised representative preterm animal models with long-term follow up.  In this episode, we meet our highlighted Early Career Inv...

A recent study reported that 53% of mothers reported exposure to violence when they were children. And there is evidence that these experiences negatively impact the health and development of their offspring later on. Associations between maternal exposure to violence, psychopathology and children's mental health outcomes is well documented. However, the pre- and postnatal programming pathways bet...

Dilated cardiomyopathy (DCM) is a rare but serious condition of children and often progresses to heart failure. The outcomes for children with DCM are poor, with 50% of pediatric patients dying or needing a heart transplant within 5 years of diagnosis.  In this episode, Geoff Marsh meets professor Carmen Sucharov from the University of Colorado Anschutz campus and the director...

Thousands of women have been infected with SARS-CoV2 during the COVID-19 pandemic. While very few of these infections have been shown to transmit vertically from mother to offspring, it remains unclear what effect, if any, a mother's SARS-CoV2 infection has on fetal development.  In this episode, we interview Dr Brian Kalish from the University of Toronto and the Hospital for Sick Childr...

Twenty-five percent of children who survive acute symptomatic seizures as neonates go on to develop epilepsy. Whilst there are several known risk factors, currently not enough is known about the mechanisms behind the development of epilepsy following neonatal brain injury, and thus it is not yet possible to reliably predict the individual risk of developing this disease in this group of...

Most very preterm infants experience apneas of prematurity. It is a common comorbidity of prematurity, and therefore reliable real-time monitoring of respiratory rates is key in these infants. The conventionalmethod is to use chest impedance measured with electrodes on the surface of the thorax. However, this method is known to be unreliable, as it is prone to motion artifacts. For this reason, in...

There is a growing body of evidence showing that excessive early media use is detrimental to children's physical and mental health. As such, the World Health Organization guidelines suggest that screen time for infants should be limited to a maximum of one hour per day. However, with the growing ubiquity of digital media, it is thought that preschoolers are exposed to more than two hours of screen...