Maternal, Newborn, and Adolescent Health

Christopher Yip of the University of Toronto in Canada will test whether measuring skin thickness and cellular composition by non-invasive diffuse optical spectroscopy can be used to estimate the gestational age of newborns, which is important for maternal and child health. They will first determine how light absorption and scattering properties of skin tissue at differing depths correlate with skin structure and then apply their approach to neonates of defined ages.

Peter Marschik from the Medical University of Graz in Austria will develop a mobile phone app to assess general movement in infants under 6 months of age for diagnosing neurological defects and predicting the development of abnormalities particularly in low-resource settings. General movement assessments (GMA) reflect the functioning of the developing brain and are normally made by video recording the whole body of an infant over 3-5 minutes followed by expert analysis.

Beth Smith from the University of Southern California in the U.S. will determine whether monitoring the arm movements of infants can be used to as a non-invasive proxy for neural development to help identify defects and aid treatment. They will perform a longitudinal study of 45 children, including preterm infants, who will be assessed monthly from one to six months of age. Motion sensory equipment will measure the type and quality of their arm movements, which will be correlated with cortical brain activity measured via electroencephalography (EEG).

Stephen Chou of Princeton University in the U.S. will further develop a simple and inexpensive assay for diagnosing fetal brain injury using smartphones to detect biomarkers from a drop of blood that can be used by untrained individuals. Biomarkers of brain function have been identified, but technological limitations mean their detection requires expensive assays and trained professionals.

Laura Goetzl of Temple University in the U.S. will analyze whether the presence of specific microRNAs in maternal blood during early pregnancy can act as biomarkers of fetal neurodevelopment. Although the causes of neurological disorders such as autism are mostly unknown, they likely involve early defects in neurodevelopment. However, there is no simple, low-cost method for monitoring fetal neurodevelopment.

Nana Coleman of World Vision in the U.S. will teach positive parenting skills such as hugging, reading, and playing to parents in Armenia to promote healthy childhood development. They will exploit their existing network of health care providers and parent support groups to teach better parenting behavior, and integrate it with another program they have been running to improve child and maternal health. They will test whether this holistic strategy is more effective at changing parental behavior and improving childhood nutrition and development than the individual approaches.

Silvia Rigato and Karla Holmboe of the University of Essex in the United Kingdom will track the development of attention and social skills in infants over time to enable the early identification of children with impairments. They will recruit 60 infants and analyze attention skills such as alertness monitored by heart rate, and social skills such as face perception monitored by eye tracking, from the last trimester of pregnancy through to 10 months old.

Patrick De Boever of VITO in Belgium will study the effects of stress on neurodevelopment in children by building a database of biological markers of the stress response detected in saliva. They will generate comprehensive genetic and epigenetic profiles, such as DNA methylation patterns, of salivary samples taken after laboratory-controlled or environmental stress events from over 1000 children of a range of ages and backgrounds. The aim is to capture developmental changes in stress reactivity over time and use the profiles to predict the course of neurological development.

Maitreyi Mazumdar of Boston Children's Hospital in the U.S. will use existing data from epidemiology studies in Bangladesh, Mexico City, and Oklahoma to develop a scoring system to identify children at high risk of developing cognitive impairments also beyond childhood. The data were derived from prospective studies of individuals across the prenatal, early childhood and adolescent time periods, and include anthropomorphic measurements, full scale IQ, and other clinical and nutritional data.

Damien Fair of Oregon Health & Science University in the U.S. will determine whether combinations of prenatal and early postnatal stress markers can be used to predict the developmental trajectories of specific cognitive processes known as executive functions, which underlie goal-directed behavior and are important for many social and academic skills.