In this article, the role of hypothermia and neuroprotection for neonatal encephalopathy will be discussed. The incidence of encephalopathy due to hypoxia ischemia as well as the pathophysiology will be presented. The diagnosis of encephalopathy in full-term neonates will be discussed. The current management of brain injury that occurs with ...

Brain death is accepted in most countries as death. The rationales to explain why brain death is death are surprisingly problematic. The standard rationale that in brain death there has been loss of integrative unity of the organism has been shown to be false, and a better rationale has not ...

The objective of the present study was to determine whether a developmental difference occurs in brain activity when infants look at frontal and profile views using near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS), which is an optical imaging technique used to measure changes in the concentrations of oxyhemoglobin (oxy-Hb), deoxyhemoglobin (deoxy-Hb), and total hemoglobin ...

A patent ductus arteriosus (PDA) alters pulmonary mechanics and regional blood flow in the preterm infant. Its significance with respect to brain injury and brain development are unclear. We evaluated the effects of surgical ductal ligation on the preterm baboon brain. Baboons were delivered at 125 d of gestation (dg, ...

Glucocorticoids (GCs) are administered to human fetuses at risk of premature delivery and to infants with life-threatening respiratory and cardiac conditions. However, there are ongoing concerns about adverse effects of GC treatment on the developing human brain, although the precise molecular mechanisms underlying GC-induced brain injury are unclear. Here, we ...

This study describes the relation between frequent and clinically relevant brain imaging findings in very preterm infants (GA<32 weeks), assessed with sequential cranial ultrasonography throughout the neonatal period and MRI around term age, and several potential perinatal risk factors. For ultrasound findings during admission the following independent risk factors were ...

Brain abscess is uncommon in the pediatric population. Here, we report one such case due to Candida albicans in one-year-old infant, without any predisposing factors. The child presented with progressively increasing size of head circumference. The diagnosis was confirmed by CT scan of brain and microbiological investigations on the drained ...

Preterm infants have smaller cerebral and cerebellar volumes at term compared with term born infants. Perinatal factors leading to the reduction in volumes are not well known. IL-6 -174 and -572 genotypes partly regulate individual immunologic responses and have also been connected with deviant neurologic development in preterm infants. Our ...

Systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) is an autoimmune disease mediated by autoantibodies and preferentially affecting women of childbearing age. Because the offspring of mothers with SLE show a high frequency of learning disorders, we hypothesized that maternally transferred autoantibodies that bind DNA and the N-methyl-D-aspartate receptor (NMDAR) could have a pathogenic ...

BACKGROUND: Brain abscess in infants is extremely rare in the developed world. Often, these children have a predisposing history and are infected with certain bacterial aetiology. CASE HISTORY: A 3-month-old boy presented to the hospital emergently with an increased intracranial pressure crisis. All predisposing factors such as maternal history, family ...

There is strong evidence that prolonged, moderate cerebral hypothermia initiated within a few hours after severe hypoxia-ischemia and continued until resolution of the acute phase of delayed cell death can reduce neuronal loss and improve behavioral recovery in term infants and adults after cardiac arrest. This review examines the evidence ...

Neuroprotectin D1 (NPD1), a docosahexaenoic acid-derived autacoid, is an endogenous neuroprotective and anti-inflammatory mediator that is generated in the retina and brain. The effects of exogenous NPD1 on retinal ganglion cell (RGC) apoptosis and the role of 12/15-lipoxygenase (Alox15) in retina were evaluated after optic nerve transection (ONT). Treatment with ...

OBJECTIVE: Oxygen toxicity has been identified as a risk factor for adverse neurological outcome in survivors of preterm birth. In infant rodent brains, hyperoxia induces disseminated apoptotic neurodegeneration. Because a tissue-protective effect has been observed for recombinant erythropoietin (rEpo), widely used in neonatal medicine for its hematopoietic effect, we examined ...

The application of volumetric techniques to preterm infants has revealed brain volume reductions. Such quantitative data are not available in routine neonatal radiologic care. The objective of this study was to develop simple brain metrics to compare brain size in preterm and term infants and to correlate these metrics with ...

Intracerebral injection of ibotenate in newborn rodents produces brain damage that mimics that of infants with cerebral palsy. Because maternal infection may contribute to brain injury in preterm infants, we investigated brain damage after maternal inflammation and postnatal ibotenate treatment in a rat model of cerebral palsy. Pregnant rats were ...

An increase in brain size is a hallmark of human evolution. Questions regarding the evolution of brain development and obstetric constraints in the human lineage can be addressed with accurate estimates of the size of the brain at birth in hominins. Previous estimates of brain size at birth in fossil ...

A range of early circumstances surrounding the birth of a child affects peripartum hormones, parental behavior and infant wellbeing. One of these factors, which may lead to postpartum depression, is the mode of delivery: vaginal delivery (VD) or cesarean section delivery (CSD). To test the hypothesis that CSD mothers would ...

OBJECT: Raised intracranial pressure (ICP) that is associated with hydrocephalus may lead to alterations in cerebral hemodynamics and ischemic changes in the brain. In infants with hydrocephalus, defining the right moment for surgical intervention based on clinical signs alone can sometimes be a difficult task. Clinical signs of raised ICP ...

Continuously monitoring brain ftinction at the bedside in the NICU for term infants at risk of brain injury has become part of routine clinical practice in many countries. These monitors offer invaluable information about the sick infant's neurologic status by providing real-time measurements of the brain's electrical activity and identifring ...

Preterm birth is associated with an increased risk of developmental difficulties. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is increasingly being used to identify damage to the brain following preterm birth. It is hoped this information will aid prognostication and identify neonates who would benefit from early therapeutic intervention. Cystic periventricular white matter ...

We have generated a syntaxin 1A knockout mouse by deletion of exons 3 through 6 and a concomitant insertion of a stop codon in exon 2. Heterozygous knockout animals were viable with no apparent phenotype. In contrast, the vast majority of homozygous animals died in utero, with embryos examined at ...

Spatial normalization and segmentation of infant brain MRI data based on adult or pediatric reference data may not be appropriate due to the developmental differences between the infant input data and the reference data. In this study we have constructed infant templates and a priori brain tissue probability maps based ...

The aim of the present study was to compare the walking abilities in infants with and without periventricular leukomalacia and to see whether the severity of the brain damage was related to locomotor outcome of the infants at 12 and 18 months. 47 newborns were included in the study based ...

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE: Comparisons of spontaneous movements of premature infants with brain injuries and those without brain injuries can provide insights into normal and abnormal processes in the ontogeny of motor development. In this study, the characteristics of spontaneous upper-extremity movements of premature infants with brain injuries and those without ...

Neonatal encephalopathy is a major predictor of neurodevelopmental disability in term infants and occurs in 1 to 6 of every 1,000 live term births. Despite improvements in perinatal practice during the past several decades, the incidence of cerebral palsy attributed to neonatal asphyxia remained essentially unchanged, primarily because management strategies ...

Our goal was to determine how a mother's brain responds to her own infant's facial expressions, comparing happy, neutral, and sad face affect. In an event-related functional MRI study, 28 first-time mothers were shown novel face images of their own 5- to 10-month-old infant and a matched unknown infant. Sixty ...

In the human brain, the morphology of cortical gyri and sulci is complex and variable among individuals, and it may reflect pathological functioning with specific abnormalities observed in certain developmental and neuropsychiatric disorders. Since cortical folding occurs early during brain development, these structural abnormalities might be present long before the ...

The human genome, and hence the human brain at birth, may not have changed greatly over the past 60000 years. Yet many of the major behavioural changes that we associate with most human societies are very much more recent, some appearing with the sedentary revolution of some 10000 years ago. ...

Injury to the perinatal brain is a leading cause of childhood mortality and lifelong disability. Cerebral palsy and cognitive impairment are usually related to periventricular white matter damage, which is seen chiefly in babies born before 32 wk gestational age, and to corticosubcortical lesions, which occur mainly in full-term infants. ...

OBJECTIVE: Extremely preterm birth is associated with adverse neurodevelopmental sequelae. Head circumference has been used as a measure of brain growth. There are limited data relating head circumference to MRI. The purpose of this work was to establish the relationship between head circumference with brain MRI at term-equivalent age and ...

BACKGROUND: What a diagnosis of brain stem death (the term used in the United Kingdom) or brain death (the term used in the United States) means to the family members of potential organ donors is an important issue to explore as biomedicine moves to expand the range of end-of-life technologies ...

Patterns of cortical functional connectivity in normal infants were examined during natural sleep by observing the time course of very low frequency oscillations. Such oscillations represent fluctuations in blood oxygenation level and cortical blood flow thus allowing computation of neurophysiologic connectivity. Structural and resting-state information were acquired for 11 infants, ...

AIM: To investigate if the early electroencephalogram (EEG) and amplitude-integrated EEG (aEEG) in very preterm infants is affected by perinatal inflammation and brain injury, and correlates with long-term outcome. METHODS: Sixteen infants born at 24-28 gestational weeks (median 25.5) had continuous EEG/aEEG during the first 72 h of life. Minimum ...

Over the past 30 years researchers have learned a great deal about the development of object processing in infancy. In contrast, little is understood about the neural mechanisms that underlie this capacity, in large part because there are few techniques available to measure brain functioning in human infants. The present ...

Near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) provides a unique method of monitoring infant brain function by measuring the changes in the concentrations of oxygenated and deoxygenated hemoglobin. During the past 10 years, NIRS measurement of the developing brain has rapidly expanded. In this article, a brief discussion of the general principles of NIRS, ...

Apnea of pre-maturity is common, occurring in 85% of infants born less than 34 week gestation. Oral caffeine is the most frequent form of therapy, often in conjunction with the use of intubation and intermittent ventilation. Morphine is used to reduce the pain believed to be associated with the latter. ...

"Autophagy" is a highly conserved pathway for degradation, by which wasted intracellular macromolecules are delivered to lysosomes, where they are degraded into biologically active monomers such as amino acids that are subsequently re-used to maintain cellular metabolic turnover and homeostasis. Recent genetic studies have shown that mice lacking an autophagy-related ...

Twenty-seven preterm infants were compared to 10 full-term infants at term equivalent age using a voxel-based analysis of diffusion tensor imaging of the brain. Preterm infants exhibited higher fractional anisotropy values, which may suggest accelerated maturation, in the location of the sagittal stratum. While some earlier findings in preterm infants ...

This report present an infant with nystagmus, strabismus, salt and pepper and scars in funduscopy, calcification in Brain CT scan and high titer of Anti Toxoplasmosis antibody. A 10 month old infant that referred with nystagmus, strabismus after fever which appeared five months ago. In funduscopy of both eyes, salt ...

OBJECTIVE AND IMPORTANCE: Hypoxic-ischemic brain injuries in childhood are associated with poor neurological outcome. Recently, experimental and clinical works show that nerve growth factor (NGF) reduces neurological deficits and promotes endothelial cells proliferation and angiogenesis following hypoxic-ischemic brain injuries. After brain stroke, new neurons express a protein, called doublecortin (DCX), ...

In extremely preterm infants, neonatal brain injury and interruption of the normal maturation of the brain result in functional impairments that appear to manifest in later life. The roots of these impairments may be evaluated in the newborn infant using neurophysiologic techniques, such as evoked potentials and event-related potentials. This ...

OBJECTIVE: Abnormal cerebellar development was recently recognized to be related to prematurity. Aim of the present study was to evaluate preterm birth and possible peri- and postnatal risk factors associated with this type of brain injury. PATIENTS AND METHODS: We report on a series of 35 very low birth weight ...

We evaluated the brain of a 4-month-old male infant whose mother had inadequately controlled maternal phenylketonuria (MPKU). At autopsy his brain was normally developed but underweight. We found ventriculomegaly, hypoplastic cerebral white matter, and delay of myelination in late myelinating tracts without white matter astrocytosis and without chronic lesions in ...

Selenoprotein P (Sepp1) contains most of the selenium in blood plasma, and it is utilized by the kidney, brain, and testis as a selenium source for selenoprotein synthesis. We recently demonstrated that apolipoprotein E receptor-2 (ApoER2) is required for Sepp1 uptake by the testis and that deletion of ApoER2 reduces ...

There is a high incidence of periventricular leukomalacia, caused by hypoxia-ischemia, in preterm infants. These lesions damage the periventricular crossroads of commissural, projection and associative pathways, which are in a close topographical relationship with the lateral ventricles. We explored to what extent abnormalities of echogenicity of the periventricular crossroads correlate ...

Drugs that suppress neuronal activity, including general anesthetics used in pediatric and obstetric medicine, trigger neuroapoptosis in the developing rodent brain. Exposure of infant rats for 6 hours to a combination of anesthetic drugs (midazolam, nitrous oxide, isoflurane) reportedly causes widespread apoptotic neurodegeneration, followed by lifelong cognitive deficits. Isoflurane, the ...

Perinatal hypoxia-ischemia or birth asphyxia is a serious complication with a high mortality and morbidity. For decades, neuroprotective options have been explored to reduce reperfusion and reoxygenation injury to the brain, which accounts for a substantial part of birth asphyxia-related brain damage. In this review, we focus on neuroprotective strategies ...

Olopatadine, a new second-generation antihistamine, is widely used in the treatment of allergic disorders. The low levels of histamine H1 receptor occupancy in human brain by olopatadine, which is related to its minimal sedation, suggest its low penetration into the brain. The present study evaluates the impact of P-glycoprotein (P-gp) ...

Antegrade cerebral perfusion (ACP) is a cardiopulmonary bypass technique that uses special cannulation procedures to perfuse only the brain during neonatal and infant aortic arch reconstruction. It is used in lieu of deep hypothermic circulatory arrest (DHCA), and thus has the theoretical advantage of protecting the brain from hypoxic ischemic ...

This paper examines attachment theory in the context of the biology of affect regulation and the convergence of these in psychotherapeutic processes. Because of recent advances in understanding how the infant brain/mind/body is shaped by the infant's first social experiences, the purpose of this investigation is to extract those underlying ...