Pediatric Research Podcast

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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 patient's quality of life...

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 neonate's blood volume, oxygenation and circulatory stabilisation, thus aiding transition...

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 Investigator Olga Romantsik, from Lund University in Sweden...

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...