NIH awards $2M for URI research project

URI RESEARCHER Judith Mercer, a clinical professor of nursing and certified nurse-midwife,  has received a $2 million grant to study the health of pre-term infants. /
URI RESEARCHER Judith Mercer, a clinical professor of nursing and certified nurse-midwife, has received a $2 million grant to study the health of pre-term infants. /

KINGSTON – A nursing professor at the University of Rhode Island has been awarded a $2 million, five-year grant by a division of the National Institutes of Health, to support her research on the benefits of delaying umbilical cord clamping for pre-term infants.

The research, led by Prof. Judith Mercer, a clinical professor of nursing and certified nurse-midwife, is being conducted at Women & Infants Hospital in Providence.

The grant comes from the National Institute for Nursing Research, which already provided $392,000 for a smaller, earlier project involving 72 mother-infant pairs that showed a brief delay in clamping the umbilical cords of babies born before 32 weeks prevents bleeding in the brain and infections.

The findings garnered international attention, but in a news release, Mercer said that to make delayed cord clamping for premature babies the norm at hospitals nationwide, the practice has to be supported by larger studies.

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The current obstetrical practice in the United States for very low birth weight infants is to clamp umbilical cords immediately. But Mercer said when immediate cord clamping occurs, more than 25 percent of the fetal-placental blood volume may be left in the placenta, acutely increasing vulnerability to hypovolemia, a loss of blood and fluids that can lead to shock.

The smaller study showed fewer cases of intraventricular hemorrhage and infection among those babies whose cords were clamped after a brief delay, but the sample may have been too small to find negative effects of delayed cord clamping.

About 57,000 infants are born each year in the United States at a weight of less than 1,500 grams (roughly 3 pounds), and of those, 10 percent develop cerebral palsy and 25 to 50 percent show later cognitive and behavioral deficits, Mercer said.

The new study will involve 212 infants and will seek not only to validate the previous findings, but also identify the causes of the benefits of delayed cord clamping through the study of biologic markers. The infants will be selected randomly starting in April for inclusion in an experimental group and a control group, and will be followed until they are 7 months old.

“This low-tech change in clinical practice has the potential to reduce the risk of disease and disability and to improve the neonatal and early childhood outcomes for these most vulnerable pre-term infants,” Mercer said in the news release. “This area of research comes from 30 years of work as a practicing nurse-midwife. I have always delayed cord clamping in my practice with term infants.”

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