BRAIN STORMS: Looking like weather maps on the evening news, these graphs depict the amount of coherence between neuronal function and blood flow (NVC). An HIE baby that received cooling therapy showed greater coupling (left, red blobs), while a baby whose brain was damaged despite cooling therapy showed less (right).SCIENTIFIC REPORTS, 7:45958, 2017
Until a little more than a decade ago, doctors had few options to treat newborns whose brains were deprived of oxygen or blood at birth, a condition known as perinatal hypoxic-ischemic encephalopathy, or HIE. If babies could be stabilized and kept breathing, physicians and nurses could offer only supportive care and had to watch and wait to see how much brain damage their patients would suffer. “This was a disease where we had no treatment that worked, and [around] 60 percent of these babies were either dying or had a disability,” says Rosemary Higgins, a program scientist at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.
In 2005, research findings reshaped the field. Higgins and other neonatologists reported the results of a couple of ...
