We are thrilled that the INFANT team has reached the final stage of the international Saving Lives at Birth Grand Challenge.

This funding programme is dedicated to identifying and scaling up transformative prevention and treatment approaches for pregnant women and newborns.

The team are at the final to compete for funding to develop our Newborn Brain Audioscope innovation. The audioscope is a portable device that will allow healthcarers to hear brainwaves and assess the brain health of babies.

Why do we need to assess brain health?

Each year, there are 2.9 million neonatal deaths worldwide. 1 million of these are due to birth asphyxia: a lack of oxygen around the time of birth. 98% of these deaths occur in low/low-middle income countries (LMIC).  As a result, birth asphyxia accounts for 41 million “disability adjusted life years” (the number of years lost due to ill-health, disability or early death). Birth asphyxia is therefore one of the leading causes of mortality and morbidity in low-middle income countries. Of the children who survive birth asphyxia, 1 million of them develop neurodevelopmental disorders, including learning disabilities, intellectual disabilities, and cerebral palsy.

What can be done to prevent this?

Although neurological problems are more likely to happen in the early neonatal period than at any other time of life, it is the exact period when there is the least brain monitoring. Many of these neonatal deaths and lifelong disabilities could be prevented if the babies’ brains were monitored. Currently, the only way to monitor the brain is to use expensive EEG machines that require high levels of skill to acquire and interpret signals.

The development of the Newborn Brain Audioscope would change this. The device will follow the conventional stethoscope design – a hand-held tool with a sensor pad to be applied to the baby’s head that will enable any kind of healthcare professional to listen for activity through headphones. Babies that have suffered severe encephalopathy (brain disorders) often have absent brain activity in the first few hours of life or if they are suffering “fits” or seizures, this sound will be heard and interpreted easily by the healthcare professional using the same skills they use with a stethoscope.

The development of a portable and easily accessible device to assess brain functioning may revolutionise neurocritical care of newborns in resource limited settings.

We would like to call on your help to support this proposal with just a few clicks.

The team’s proposed project aims to develop a neurological “stethoscope” to help identify babies at highest risk of brain injury soon after birth. 85% of neonatal deaths worldwide occur in developing countries and a major cause is neonatal brain disorder due to asphyxia. EEG machines are expensive and the time and skills needed to acquire and interpret the signals are all obstacles to their use in the developing world. This project’s brain ‘stethoscope’ will be able to monitor brain function in a low-cost and simplified way, just as a conventional stethoscope is used to monitor heart beats and respiration. The results will enable us to deliver the best possible care and best outcomes for these babies.

HOW TO HELP:

The Grand Challenge includes a public voting forum for the People’s Choice Award where the public can vote online for their favourite project.  To vote for the project simply register for an account and then click the star on the project’s page.

Reaching the finals is an incredible achievement and securing the funding has the potential to save many newborn lives worldwide.

New research by INFANT researchers on the link between C-Sections and Autism Spectrum Disorder has been published. 

Autism spectrum disorder, a condition characterized by an inability to connect to other people and repetitive, often unusual behaviours, is thought to affect about 0.62% of all children. Although it is understood that the condition follows genetic lines, scientists do not know what causes ASD. There is a suggestion that it may be linked to perinatal factors, including a Caesarean delivery as children born by Caesarean section are about 21% more likely to be diagnosed with autism.

A new study by researchers at INFANT confirms previous findings, but are stresses that this relationship does not mean Caesarean births cause autism. Instead, they suggest that some unknown genetic or environmental factors may lead to both c-section delivery and the disorder.

Eileen Curran presenting the results at the European Congress of Epidemiology in Maastricht, The Netherlands on 25 June at the opening plenary session.

Led by Dr. Ali S. Khashan, the researchers set out to investigate the relationship between the mode of obstetric delivery and autism. Looking at data from the Swedish registry, they focusing on all single, live births between 1 Jan 1982 and 31 Dec 2010. Following the children until diagnosis of autism, migration, death or the study end date. The full cohort consisted of about 2.7 million children and 1% (precisely 28,290) of these children were diagnosed with autism.

Nearly 80% of the children were born by unassisted vaginal delivery, 7.3%  by assisted vaginal delivery (use of forceps or a vacuum device), 6.1% by elective section delivery and 6.5% by emergency section. Exploring the datasets, children born by elective cesarean section were 21% more likely to autistic.

When further comparisons and calculations were made, analsying the mode of delivery among more than 13,400 pairs of siblings where one child was diagnosed with autism and the other was not, the association did not hold up. They concluded that any link was likely due to unknown genetic or environmental factors and not because of how the child was delivered.

Based on the data, there is no evidence that birth by Caesarean section causes ASD. Because the association between birth by Caesarean section and autism did not persist in the sibling control analysis, we can conclude that there is no causal association. 

The overall risk of ASD is very small and our researchers’ work suggests that most — if not all — the risk isnot to do with the Caesarean section: this should be reassuring for parents. Anyone concerned about their pregnancy or their baby should speak to their health care provider.

The work has been featured on news websites such as: Huffington Post; DailyRx; MedPage Today; Doctors Lounge; Medical Daily; and Science Daily.

Source: Curran EA, Dalman C, Kearney PM, et al. Association Between Obstetric Mode of Delivery and Autism Spectrum Disorder A Population-Based Sibling Design Study. JAMA Psychiatry. 2015.

The INFANT Centre and College of Medicine and Health are delighted to host INFANT’s Inaugural Research Day on June 16, 2015.

Better Outcomes for Maternal and Fetal Health

Click here for FULL Research Day Programme

Keynote Speakers:

Prof Lucilla Poston, King’s College London

Prof Charles Lockwood, University of South Florida

Prof Ben Stenson, Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh

Prof Neil Finer, University of California

Tues 16 June 2015   09.00 – 17.30 – Registration from 08.00

Brookfield Health Sciences Complex, UCC

The Royal College of Physicians of Ireland will award 6 CPD Points to attendees

Free Registration on EventBrite

A report in the Irish Times highlights studies that seek to meet the needs of tiny babies in neonatal intensive care units.

The article explores work being done at INFANT to test a cot-side monitor to detect brain seizures in babies in the NICU.

“Some babies are at risk of having brain seizures, but you can’t always tell just by looking at them that they are seizing. And if we don’t know when they are seizing, we don’t know when to treat them,” explains Geraldine Boylan, professor of neonatal physiology at UCC and a director of the Irish Centre For Fetal and Neonatal Translational (INFANT) research centre.

To alert clinical staff to a problem, the researchers in INFANT have developed specialised software that can track the electrical signals coming from small electrode pads placed on the baby’s head: it automatically detects when a seizure is starting, and sends an alert.

The work, which was funded by agencies such as the Health Research Board, Science Foundation Ireland and the Wellcome Trust, has led to a clinical trial of the technology in NICUs in Cork, Dublin, London, Sweden and the Netherlands.

“We would like this technology to be next to every cot in every NICU in the world, keeping an eye on these babies’ brains around the clock, and we hope that it will allow brain monitoring in these tiny babies to become as commonplace as monitoring their heartbeat.”

Consent and ethics – The Role of the Family in Research

One of the most important requirements for clinical research studies in babies is getting informed consent from parents when their babies are in the NICU.

This can be difficult and it needs to be handled sensitively by the research team, but it is important to stress that often the parents and families want to help – they are fantastic, and we can’t thank them enough for their engagement at a really worrying time for the family.

Without the participation and support of the families, these clinical trials cannot happen.

It is quite stressful to consider participation in a trial when your baby has been or will be born prematurely. However, people understand that the startling improvements in neonatal medicine in recent decades are due to clinical research, and clinical trials in particular. Families support this research for altruistic reasons: they want to improve medical care for babies and families who will find themselves in their situation in the future.

People correctly debate the ethics of doing research in babies and children, but what they don’t talk about quite so much is the ethics of not doing research in babies and children. If you make it difficult to do research in babies, you end up treating them with therapies that are far less well tested than in other age groups. We do these studies to try to improve the care of babies everywhere, not just in an individual hospital or in Ireland.

On Thursday Novermber 13th, Dr Ali Khashan organised INFANT’s hosting of a public forum on C-sections. The event was attended by over 200 people. Speakers included clinicians, patients and INFANT researchers. Details of this and future related events can be had by contacting Ali by emaila.khashan@ucc.ie

New partnership announced to develop biomarker test for spontaneous preterm birth with Waters Corporation and INFANT. Prof. Louise Kenny and Dr. Anthony Morrissey of INFANT, Cork and Mike Harrington, Waters Corporation pictured here in Washington DC with the Taoiseach, Enda Kenny and Prof. Mark Ferguson, Director General, SFI.

Attending an event hosted by the Irish Science Foundation Ireland to celebrate links between Irish science and US industry as part of the St Patrick’s Day Festival, the Taoiseach welcomed the significant announcement for all parties.

The Taoiseach, Enda Kenny, TD said, “This partnership is further evidence of the great progress Ireland has made in developing partnerships between industry and academia to deliver excellence in research and innovation. This new research programme has potential to make a real difference to the health of mothers and babies. I congratulate both INFANT and the Waters Corporation on this endeavour and have no doubt we will hear more about the progress of this project as it develops.”

Professor Geraldine Boylan made the inaugural presentation at the quarterly lunchtime series of presentations on Women in Tech (STEM) which is organised by it@cork in conjunction with Cork City Council.  The presentation took place on Wednesday, 2nd of April at the Clarion Hotel in Cork city.  The free event was open to all. Geraldine spoke about how technology is used in everyday perinatal care including in the labour ward, the delivery suite and the neonatal Intensive care unit. She also discussed ongoing technology based research.

Pictured with Geraldine (middle) are Debbie Sloggett, Qualcomm (sponsors of the event) and Caroline O’Driscoll, KPMG & Director of it@cork.

The Irish Centre for Fetal and Neonatal Translational Research.

The Centre was officially launched by Seán Sherlock, TD on Friday 20th September 2013, at Cork University Hospital, Wilton, Cork, Ireland