Project Description:
Katherine Travis - PI
More than 1 in 10 children are born preterm in the United States each year. Despite advances in perinatal care practices , neurodevelopmental outcomes in preterm children have not improved substantially in the past 20 years. Adverse neurodevelopmental outcomes in preterm children have been linked to abnormalities in white matter brain development. Recent studies show that involving caregivers/parents in the developmental care of their preterm infant in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) substantially improves infants' health outcomes and facilitates caregiver-child bonds. Developmental care practices include activities such as positive touch, skin-to-skin holding (kangaroo care), swaddled holding, massage, music therapy, and reading. Currently, we know very little for how developmental care practices contribute to infant brain development. In this exploratory grant, we aim to address this gap in understanding by exploring relations between measures quantifying amounts of developmental care activities performed by infants' primary caregivers, neonatal white matter brain development, and neurodevelopmental outcomes at 18 months of age corrected for preterm birth. We derive these measures from data routinely collected as part of standard care in the NICU at Stanford's Lucile Packard Children's Hospital, a unique strength of our proposed research. Another unique strength is our team's expertise in analyses of neonatal MRIs that provide more nuanced measures of white matter health in the newborn. By examining these relations, we expect to learn more for the neurobiological mechanisms underlying the benefits of developmental care practices on newborn brain development. We believe these data will be key in unlocking the full potential of developmental care practices and advancing their use in support of infant brain health and neurodevelopment in preterm children.
