Researchers get grant to study preemie risks

Researchers at Women & Infants Hospital have been awarded a five-year $3 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to study the efficacy of an exam which aims to determine which premature infants are at risk for becoming developmentally impaired.
Barry M. Lester, director of the Brown Center for the Study of Children at Risk at Women & Infants Hospital and Brown’s Warren Alpert Medical School, is the principal investigator on the grant. He will study approximately 1,000 babies born less than 30 weeks gestation at six sites around the country, including Women & Infants. The babies will undergo an intensive neurobehavioral exam called an NNNS, which Lester developed with colleague Edward Tronick of the University of Massachusetts.
“We will use information about the infants’ medical problems and profiles on the NNNS to predict which infants will be developmentally impaired at two and one half years,” Dr. Lester said in a statement.
“The ability to identify which infants will or will not be developmentally impaired is the ‘holy grail’ that would usher in a new era of preventive intervention and improve the long-term outcome of these fragile babies,” he said.
Dr. T. Michael O’Shea of Wake Forest University is the co-principal investigator on the project.

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