Clinical Research Directory

Measuring Heart Health in Both Term, Preterm and Unwell Newborn Babies With an Advanced Ultrasound Method: Speckle Tracking Echocardiography

This study aims to improve how neonatologists check the heart function of newborn babies, especially those who are sick. While standard heart ultrasound scans are useful, a more advanced and sensitive technique called 2D speckle tracking echocardiography (STE) can detect subtle problems with how the heart muscle squeezes and relaxes. This may allow doctors to spot potential issues earlier. Our research will take place at Birmingham Women's Hospital. The investigators will perform these advanced, non-invasive heart scans on several groups of babies: 1. Healthy term and premature babies, to establish a "normal" range of heart function. 2. Babies who are unwell with specific conditions, including those with brain injury due to lack of oxygen at birth (HIE), chronic lung disease of prematurity (BPD), a hole in the diaphragm (CDH), or high blood pressure in their lungs (aPHN). The heart scan is a standard, painless procedure. Using STE does not require any extra scanning time or cause any additional discomfort to the baby; the special images are taken during the routine scan. For many of the sick babies, these scans are already part of their normal clinical care. The main goals of this observational study are to see if STE is a feasible and reliable tool in newborns, to establish normal values for healthy babies, and to track how heart function changes in sick babies during their illness and recovery. Ultimately, the investigators hope this research will provide doctors with a better tool to assess heart health in newborns. This could lead to earlier, more accurate detection of heart problems and help guide treatment decisions to improve outcomes for these vulnerable infants.

Longitudinal Assessment of Early Premature Infant Skills for Audiovisual Speech Perception

From birth, babies perceive speech face to face with their interlocutors in audiovisual situations (AV): in addition to hearing them (auditory speech), they will also, in most cases, be able to observe their speaking faces (ex: mouth movements, lips, tongue etc.) . However, the ability to associate visual speech (ex: the movement of the lips of a speaking face) with auditory speech (ex: sound information) to which it corresponds is one of the earliest signs of language development. This ability to audiovisual association is present from the age of 2.5 months in infants with Typical Development and notably allows predicting the subsequent acquisition of vocabulary from the age of 12 months. This skill allows infants to access redundant AV cues between auditory and visual speech. However this redundancy is a key piece of information allowing them, compared to an auditory situation alone, to focus their attention longer on the speech signal compared to the surrounding noises. This mechanism facilitates their subsequent language learning (identification of sounds, recognition and memorization of vocabulary, etc.) Alternatively, several studies show that children with atypical development of language and communication (e.g., Autistic Spectrum Disorder (ASD)), present clear difficulties in AV association, which may be, at least in part, at the origin of their subsequent linguistic and communicative difficulties. On the other hand, children born prematurely have a higher risk of language disorders and ASD. Furthermore, some research shows that infants born prematurely exhibit an atypical exploration of speaking faces. This atypicity could explain the subsequent language difficulties observed in these populations. Currently, we do not know at what age this ability develops in premature children and if it may be the cause of a language development disorder. The hypothesis would be that premature children develop this capacity later than full-term children. This could be one of the explanatory factors for language disorders in the first group. Our study would enrich this AV matching data in premature children and better understand the mechanisms of language delay in them. In addition to other studies, the absence of Matching AV at an expected age could be a strategy for screening for language disorders or ASD in children at risk. This would allow early implementation of intervention programs (speech therapy, parental education...)