This is my baby Isabella and she was a preemie.
She was transferred to the Nationwide Children's Hospital and that's where we met Dr. Parikh
She did develop a severe hemorrhage on the left side of her brain, right side also had
some intraventricular blood They have grades of bleeding.
The grade one, it's just very little blood, and grade four is the worst because there's
a lot of blood, there could be a lot of damage.
She had a grade three on one side and grade four on another.
When they tell you that, you don't know what's going to happen, we just prayed
Isabella spent 107 days in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit
Preemies experience unfortunately high rates of disabilities, things such as cerebral palsy,
mental retardation, deafness, blindness, behavioral problems such as attention deficit disorder,
autism It's really crucial that we understand which
types of insults are occurring and where in the brain because it allows us to understand
the cause and design interventional studies that are targeted towards that path of physiology,
that type of insult.
And the region of the brain gives us an idea of what kind of function might be affected
down the road Dr. Parikh told us about the research that
he was doing and if wanted us -- he wanted us to just think about it, if we wanted to
participate and be part of that, and of course we said yes
The perinatal brain injury MRI study is trying to understand normal and abnormal brain development
in micropreemies that are less than or equal to 32 weeks gestational age.
We take these babies within three to four weeks of birth and follow them with serial
MRIs and EEF scans, up to four EEG and MRI scans before they go home, and then we follow
them at a minimum up to two years of age After taking multiple scans, Dr. Parikh's
team creates a brain atlas -- or digital map -- of the baby's brain
Brain imaging basically allows us to peer into the brain in a non-invasive fashion to
look at its structure, its physiology or its function
Creating atlases like this allows us to automatically know for those kids that don't have this information,
we can assign information about severity of injury or severity of developmental brain
delay and that again allows us to target babies for early intervention therapies
We were able to help the family basically start physical therapy, occupational therapy
soon after discharge.
In fact, it was started in the NICU, but she continued that after going home.
They recommended us a lot of help and physical therapies so we could really start at the
earliest possible with helping her with the movement and everything.
We need to focus on quality of life.
It's absolutely essential that more people do this kind of work to identify the causes
and consequences of such insults and ideally translate that information right away to therapies
and preventive measures.
If we can help in any way, for any future experiences, because preemie babies are born
every day, we'll just do it.
It was very scary, but for all the things that she had, we were very thankful that she
ended up coming home with nothing of that, just like a regular baby.