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An Auckland intensive care doctor is pioneering research that hopes to limit brain injury in children.
Dr John Beca has been given a $75,000 grant by the Neurological Foundation to detect and monitor brain injury in children - the most common cause of death.
With brain injury, damage may continue to occur for days. Physicians have a window of opportunity for treatment, but lack the ability to continuously monitor the brain.
"We have all this sophisticated monitoring of the heart and the lungs, but we have almost no monitoring of the brain, so it's very hard to tell if the brain's been damaged, how severe the damage is, and also whether the damage is ongoing," said Dr Beca, clinical director of the paediatric intensive care unit at Starship children's hospital.
Monitoring can detect silent seizures which are common after brain injury.
"The seizures probably do more damage."
Dr Beca hopes to use a simplified electroencephalogram (EEG) to check for these seizures, which are not immediately apparent.
The simplified EEG was developed in New Zealand and its readings can be easily interpreted by intensive care doctors and nurses.
"It's been used quite a bit in neonatal units, and has been shown to be very reliable at giving information about the state of the brain, but it has not really been used outside of that group of children."
It will be used with advanced brain scans and a brain oxygen level monitor, which can show when the brain is not getting enough blood, and predict the severity of damage.
New forms of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans may also show the severity of damage within two days after injury.
Dr Beca's three-year study will involve 114 children in intensive care at Starship, ranging from newborns to 16-year-olds.
The study will determine whether these techniques, either alone or combined, can be used to select children for treatments that might limit brain damage.
They would also provide valuable information for parents and staff caring for the child.
Dr Beca said cooling the brain has been shown to be effective in limiting damage not only in newborns but also in adults following a heart attack. New drugs are also showing promise.
The study is part of $1 million awarded to research and scholarships in the foundation's December funding round.
