Offspring cardiometabolic outcomes and postnatal growth trajectories after exposure to maternal SARS-CoV-2 infection.

Objective: The objective of this study is to determine whether in utero exposure to SARS-CoV-2 is associated with increased risk for a cardiometabolic diagnosis by 18 months of age.

Methods: This retrospective electronic health record (EHR)-based cohort study included the live-born offspring of all individuals who delivered during the COVID-19 pandemic (April 1, 2020-December 31, 2021) at eight hospitals in Massachusetts. Offspring exposure was defined as a positive maternal SARS-CoV-2 polymerase chain reaction test during pregnancy.

Diffuse correlation spectroscopy blood flow monitoring for intraventricular hemorrhage vulnerability in extremely low gestational age newborns.

In premature infants with an extremely low gestational age (ELGA, < 29 weeks GA), dysregulated changes in cerebral blood flow (CBF) are among the major pathogenic factors leading to germinal matrix/intraventricular hemorrhage (GM/IVH). Continuous monitoring of CBF can guide interventions to minimize the risk of brain injury, but there are no clinically standard techniques or tools for its measurement. We report the feasibility of the continuous monitoring of CBF, including measures of autoregulation, via diffuse correlation spectroscopy (DCS) in ELGA infants using CBF variability and correlation with scalp blood flow (SBF, served as a surrogate measure of systemic perturbations).

Seizure Severity and Treatment Response in Newborn Infants with Seizures Attributed to Intracranial Hemorrhage.

Objective: We sought to characterize intracranial hemorrhage (ICH) as a seizure etiology in infants born term and preterm. For infants born term, we sought to compare seizure severity and treatment response for multisite vs single-site ICH and hypoxic-ischemic encephalopathy (HIE) with vs without ICH.

Study Design: We studied 112 newborn infants with seizures attributed to ICH and 201 infants born at term with seizures attributed to HIE, using a cohort of consecutive infants with clinically diagnosed and/or electrographic seizures prospectively enrolled in the multicenter Neonatal Seizure Registry.

COVID-19: neonatal-perinatal perspectives.

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, resulting from infection with severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), has caused severe and widespread illness in adults, including pregnant women, while rarely infecting neonates. An incomplete understanding of disease pathogenesis and viral spread has resulted in evolving guidelines to reduce transmission from infected mothers to neonates. Fortunately, the risk of neonatal infection via perinatal/postnatal transmission is low when recommended precautions are followed.

Mining multi-site clinical data to develop machine learning MRI biomarkers: application to neonatal hypoxic ischemic encephalopathy.

Background: Secondary and retrospective use of hospital-hosted clinical data provides a time- and cost-efficient alternative to prospective clinical trials for biomarker development. This study aims to create a retrospective clinical dataset of Magnetic Resonance Images (MRI) and clinical records of neonatal hypoxic ischemic encephalopathy (HIE), from which clinically-relevant analytic algorithms can be developed for MRI-based HIE lesion detection and outcome prediction.

Methods: This retrospective study will use clinical registries and big data informatics tools to build a multi-site dataset that contains structural and diffusion MRI, clinical information including hospital course, short-term outcomes (during infancy), and long-term outcomes (~ 2 years of age) for at least 300 patients from multiple hospitals.