Up to 30% of children who survive heart or lung conditions that starve the brain of oxygen go on to have significant memory problems, even when they otherwise develop normally. This research tracks babies from birth through early childhood to catch those impairments early. The problem is that hippocampal injury—damage to a brain structure critical for memory—often goes undetected until a child struggles in school, missing a window for early intervention. The team will follow newborns with these conditions for two years, using brain scans and memory tasks to map when and how deficits emerge, and whether other brain areas compensate. If successful, this work could give clinicians a way to identify at-risk infants before memory problems become entrenched, enabling early treatments that preserve a child’s ability to learn from everyday experience. A second strand examines older children to understand why some memory abilities remain intact while others falter, revealing the brain’s wiring behind that pattern. This is fundamental science on memory development, but with a direct clinical payoff: better screening and targeted therapies for a hidden cognitive disability in children.
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Memory is a critical ability in the everyday lives of children, allowing them to establish a base of knowledge about the world and remember the events of everyday life and so learn from personal experiences. Certain medical conditions that affect the heart and/or the lungs can interfere with the supply of blood and oxygen to the brain, and result in injury to the hippocampus, a memory-related structure. Our past research showed that up to 30% of children who survived such conditions and were otherwise developing normally still had significant memory impairments. In our current research programme, we aim to study infants with these medical conditions, with the goal of providing information that will allow the early identification of those at risk for hippocampal injury and memory impairment so that treatments can be implemented as early as possible. We will enroll newly born babies into our study and follow their development at specific time points over a two year period, examining their behaviour and getting images of their brains to evaluate possible injury to the hippocampus. We will also determine whether other areas of the brain are damaged, and, in those cases where the injury is limited to the hippocampus, we will find out how this affects the pattern of communication between brain areas. We will also use specific memory tasks that are sensitive to the functions of the hippocampus so that we can determine when memory impairments, if they occur at all, first become evident, and assess the degree of the deficit. We will use medical information to see whether this provides any early clues to which children will be affected and to what degree. A second part of our research plan is to study older children who have had particular heart or breathing problems as babies. This part of our work builds on our previous studies which showed that children with medical conditions affecting the supply of blood and oxygen to their brains as infants had a high rate of memory difficulties. This work also indicated that whereas certain aspects of memory were affected, others remained relatively normal. We will investigate in more detail the pattern of affected and unaffected memory abilities and their brain basis. We hope that this work will give a better overall understanding of the brain basis of memory development and will also help health care professionals develop prevention and treatment strategies for memory impairment.
Allan Goldman (Co-Investigator)Andrew Mayall Taylor (Co-Investigator)Christopher Clark (Co-Investigator)David Gadian (Co-Investigator)Faraneh Vargha-Khadem (Principal Investigator)John Eric Deanfield (Co-Investigator)Michelle De Haan (Co-Investigator)Torsten Baldeweg (Co-Investigator)
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