Maternal, Newborn, and Adolescent Health

Sean Deoni of Brown University in the U.S. will evaluate whether mapping myelination in the infant brain can predict their subsequent levels of cognitive ability such as language and motor functioning, which emerge later in childhood. Myelin is a lipid that is deposited around neuronal axons during development. Twenty-four infants between four and six months old will be recruited to a controlled pilot study.

Farrah Mateen of Massachusetts General Hospital in the U.S. will measure the thickness of the retina in children from Zimbabwe over the first five years of life using a handheld optical coherence tomography device to determine whether they can identify abnormal brain development in low-income settings. Optical coherence tomography is noninvasive and should be easy for community health workers to use. They will recruit 300 children and correlate retinal layer thicknesses with parameters including weight, height, and gestational age at birth, as well as HIV status.

Don Sharkey of the University of Nottingham in the United Kingdom will develop a software-based analysis tool to automatically calculate gestational age from simple videos of newborn faces and feet. Knowing the gestational age, particularly for babies born preterm, is critical for ensuring their healthy development. However, current dating procedures are expensive and/or require trained personnel, and as such are often unavailable in low-middle income countries.

George Wehby and colleagues at the University of Iowa in the U.S. will evaluate newborn metabolic biomarkers for their ability to predict gestational age, and identify associations between them and long-term academic achievement. They will analyze existing newborn metabolic profiles and academic tests from almost one million children in Iowa born between 1980 and 2006 to identify the most predictive biomarkers. In the future they will expand their method to developing countries to help estimate gestational age and identify newborns at risk of neurodevelopmental defects.

Shannon Ross-Sheehy of East Tennessee State University in the U.S. will study whether simply monitoring eye movements in infants can be used to measure their neural development. During the first year of life, infant's brains are highly plastic and thus potentially more amenable to the correction of any developmental defects. However, these defects are often only detected in childhood, which may be too late.

Vasily Yarnykh from the University of Washington in the U.S. will test whether measuring myelin content in the brain using a low-cost magnetic resonance imaging method can act as a reliable biomarker for brain maturation. They will build on a method involving the measurement of the macromolecular proton fraction by magnetic resonance. This method will be converted to a non-image-based and non-localized method that can be more easily and inexpensively used to measure myelin content in developing countries.

Laura Jelliffe-Pawlowski of the University of California, San Francisco in the U.S. is developing an algorithm to measure gestational age from metabolic markers taken during routine newborn screening. Measuring accurate gestational age is important for assessing infant health such as brain development, but it is challenging in developing countries without specialized equipment and expertise. In Phase I, they developed a statistical model using data on 51 metabolic markers from around 730,000 newborns in the U.S.

Yuval Gielchinsky of Hadassah Medical Center in Israel will develop a non-invasive approach for determining gestational age by analyzing DNA methylation profiles in cells from umbilical cord blood. Accurate gestational age is critical for monitoring and promoting the healthy development of newborns. Current gestational age dating approaches require expensive equipment and trained users, or are relatively inaccurate. Previous work has linked gestational age with epigenetic states such as the patterns of methylation along DNA.

John Spencer of the University of East Anglia in the United Kingdom along with Sean Deoni of the University of Colorado in the U.S. are assessing the trajectory of brain development during the first two years of age using a range of imaging, physiological and behavioral assessment tools to understand how development is affected by environmental factors such as nutrition, stress, and parent-child interaction.

Marilyn Nations from the University of Fortaleza in Brazil will evaluate a program established in 1990 at a public hospital in Fortaleza that was designed to increase bonding between fathers and their newborns and thereby improve overall health, as well as reducing crime rates. Fortaleza has a high crime rate mostly linked to low socioeconomic class males.