As an example, premature infants often suffer from a lung condition called bronchopulmonary dysplasia (BPD), which requires the use of oxygen and other supportive measures, and places them at high risk for developing chronic respiratory obstruction later in life. However, researchers have found that the success of therapies used to treat BPD in newborns did not necessarily correlate with success in staving off the chronic conditions, suggesting the currently used outcome measures are not reliable. To address this deficiency, two separate projects have been funded and will be conducted by researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and at Tufts University. The goals of the of these projects are to develop new tools to define the extent of functional impairment due to BPD in neonates and to establish a registry to track and quantify the onset and extent of chronic lung problems in these at-risk infants as they grow older, respectively.

In another example, the tools such as blood pressure cuffs that doctors use to diagnose and treat hypertension were developed for adults and have never been validated in children. As a result, researchers have had a hard time detailing the effectiveness of treatments for high blood pressure in children. To address this problem, researchers at Case Western Reserve University received funding to adapt the blood pressure cuffs to children. To better understand blood pressure patterns in children, a consortium of five CTSAs led by investigators at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine will enroll children between the ages of 10 and18 years into a six-month study of the effect of home-based diet and lifestyle modification on blood pressure.

Source: NIH/National Center for Research Resources