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College of Nursing > Faculty Funded Research
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MICROBIOME AS POTENTIAL MEDIATOR IN PRETERM INFANT NEURODEVELOPMENT
Tentative Start Date unknown
Tentative End Date unkown
Preterm infants account for 12% of births, but disproportionately account for 40% of children who have cerebral palsy (CP), 25% of children with hearing impairment and 35% of those with vision impairment. Thus optimizing neurodevelopmental outcomes for preterm patients would have significant impact on outcome numbers for all children. Neurodevelopmental potential of the preterm infant is influenced by (i) Gestational age (GA), (ii) events in the neonatal intensive care unit, and (iii) care in the home environment after NICU discharge. This proposal will focus on understanding events that increase or decrease the risk of developmental impairment after an infant has been born preterm at a given gestational age, not on the prior exposures of prenatal and social factors that may have increased the risk of preterm birth. For a given infant, factors that caused preterm delivery are complete and fixed. Our goal is to instead focus on factors that are prospectively modifiable from the time of birth through early childhood in order to optimize a given infant’s neurodevelopmental potential. We will follow infants in two environments through two epochs – the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) hospital course from birth to discharge and the home environment from NICU discharge through school readiness evaluation at four to six years of age. We will investigate the microbiome as a potential biologic effector of clinical and environmental factors associated with neurodevelopmental outcome in these epochs.
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