Move over Rover, Otis-AI is taking lead. These cheery animatronic puppies strutted, fetched, and played with young patients at Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital Stanford.
Posts Tagged with
research
How a Cystic Fibrosis Drug Given Prenatally Changed the Lives of One Family
Giving a new cystic fibrosis medication to a pregnant woman who carries the gene for the disease was unexpectedly beneficial for her fetus, a Stanford Medicine team found.
‘It’s Listening’: Addressing Maternal Health Disparities
Throughout her career and her life, Irogue Igbinosa, MD, a maternal-fetal medicine specialist, has always noticed disparities in health outcomes for pregnant Black women. It’s an issue she’s now working to address.
The Novel Idea of Reading to Infants: How an Annual Reading Program Helps NICU Babies and Caregivers
George Rivosecchi says Stanford Medicine Children’s Health NICU Reading Program provides him and his daughter a great bonding experience.
Back to School: Jason Yeatman on How Children Learn to Read
An expert answers questions that parents may have about how children learn to read and how to identify when a child is struggling.
Predicting the Best Treatment for Young Ulcerative Colitis Patients
Children and teens with ulcerative colitis have many more treatment options than a decade ago,… Read more »
$1 Million Gift to Provide Major Benefits for Nursing Science and Well-Being Programs
Several key programs and initiatives supporting nurses and their patients at Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital Stanford are receiving a big boost, thanks to a $1 million gift from an anonymous donor.
Stanford Research Uncovers Health Risks for Mothers Giving Birth in Two-Mom Families
A recently published study outlines several pregnancy and birth risks for mothers in two-mom families. Certain complications, including serious conditions such as postpartum hemorrhage, were substantially more common in these mothers.
Changing Infant Care to Improve Newborns’ Health in India
Modifying traditional infant massages led to more weight gain and fewer illnesses among newborns in a Stanford-led community study in India.
Premature Babies’ Survival Rate is Climbing, Study Says
A comprehensive new study of premature babies in the United States is helping redefine what it means for a premature infant to survive.
From Loss Comes Hope: Early Clinical Trial Results Show Promise for Treating Pediatric Brain Tumor
When Jace Ward came to Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital Stanford to join a clinical trial for a novel therapy, he had been fighting a deadly brainstem tumor for more than a year. A group of Stanford scientists published data from the trial Ward joined.
Stanford Team Finds Benefits to Online Autism Treatment
In the early phase of the COVID-19 pandemic, Stanford Medicine researchers had to pause a study of autism treatment in preschoolers. The halt was stressful for kids and their families, so a team of pediatric psychologists pivoted to offering the treatment online.
Names on Surgical Caps Boost Communication During C-sections, Study Finds
New Stanford research finds labeled surgical caps improve communication among patients and health care providers during C-sections.
Tara and Dave Dollinger Give $2.4 Million to Build Out Biorepository That Will Provide Clues to a Rare Illness
Tara and Dave Dollinger recently donated $2.4 million to assist the efforts of Jennifer Frankovich, MD, MS and collaborating scientists.
Language Nutrition in the NICU
Fall into Reading is a NICU event created to encourage parents to talk to their infants for a positive impact on their baby’s development.
Virtual Pitch Competition Recognizes Pediatric Device Innovators
Seed funding awarded to start-ups working to develop health technology for children.
Storytime at NICU
Stanford researchers seek to demonstrate how parents talking can influence healthy development in preterm babies.
Closing the Gap for the Littlest Patients Who Need Long-Term Care
The Stanford doctors fuel California’s HRIF state initiative through research revealing gaps in high risk infant follow up care referrals, and among certain sociodemographic groups.
Stanford Trial Shows Parents Can Learn Therapy to Help Their Children With Autism Learn to Speak
When James Pim was small, he struggled to express himself. His mom enrolled in a Stanford trial of an autism therapy called pivotal response treatment with the hope that she could help him understand how to use words to communicate.
Minor heart defects at birth shown to increase risk for cardiac disease risk later in life, Stanford study finds
Being born with a minor heart defect is a surprisingly big deal in the long… Read more »
A decade of advances in prematurity research at Stanford
Babies who are born prematurely, arriving three or more weeks early, face a variety of… Read more »
How to feed the smallest preemies
A new toolkit from the California Perinatal Quality Care Collaborative, co-authored by a panel that included three Stanford experts, will help spread the latest research on preemie nutrition to doctors around the world.
Excitement brews around promise of gene editing
Matthew Porteus, MD, PhD, is leading clinical research for CRISPR at Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital and hopes to launch Stanford’s first clinical trial of CRISPR next year.
Christopher Almond, MD discusses pediatric heart pump trial
Stanford is leading a multisite study of a new ventricular assist device for children who are awaiting heart transplantation.
Immunotherapy may help treat kids’ brain tumors
In trials in mice, a therapy developed at Stanford safely and effectively treated five types of pediatric brain tumors.
Advances in stem-cell and gene-therapy
Using stem cells and gene therapy to treat or cure disease may still sound like science fiction, but it is moving closer and closer to fact.
“Lifting the hood” on rare immune diseases can help patients get the treatment they need
When a patient has an unusual immune dysfunction, a few generalized therapies — steroid medications, for instance — are given to try to quiet the problem.
Stanford researchers expand comparison of males and females with anorexia
Research on anorexia nervosa often excludes boys and men, who make up about 10 percent of those affected by the serious eating disorder.
Stem cells give Stanford scientists a new window into the biology of a rare disease
Recently, Stanford pediatric cardiologist Marlene Rabinovitch, MD, and her team published new research that advances their quest to understand a serious — and very puzzling — lung disease.
Stanford team helps patient who is “unique in the world”
In the age of genetic medicine, it’s still surprisingly difficult to diagnose rare genetic diseases, and even more complicated to identify brand-new ones. But several Stanford scientists are working on ways to change that.
Infant at Stanford first to get drug for deadly neurodegenerative disease
If the only hope for your baby daughter lay in a brand-new experimental drug, would you want doctors to give it to her? What if she would be the first infant in the world to receive it?
Recent study highlights California teens’ misconceptions about marijuana
Thanks to years of public health education, cigarette smoking is on the decline for teens. Marijuana use hasn’t changed, with around 20 percent of 12th graders reporting they’ve recently smoked marijuana.
PTSD affects boys’ and girls’ brains differently, Stanford study finds
For many years, scientists have known that adolescent girls are about twice as likely as boys to develop post-traumatic stress disorder after being exposed to a psychologically traumatic event. But no one has been sure why.
New hormone helps explain how high-fat diets make us fatter
A Stanford team published their discovery of a hormone that signals when the body needs more fat stores. It sends its message in response to two external signals that we already knew could make people fatter.
The long awaited and newly FDA-approved ‘artificial pancreas’ for type 1 diabetes has arrived
Doctors at Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital Stanford led the way in testing the device and are currently in the next phase of studying the technology in younger children.
Iron nanoparticles prompt immune system to attack cancer, Stanford researchers find
Recently, a team of Stanford researchers was testing a new way to fight cancer when something strange happened. The team, led by pediatric radiologist Heike Daldrup-Link, MD, was studying whether tiny bits of iron could act as Trojan horses, sneaking chemotherapy into tumor cells. They tested the idea in mice, but the results were not what they expected.
Mystery solved: Researchers use genetic tools to diagnose young girl’s rare heart condition
Right after Astrea Li born, she went into cardiac arrest, not just once, but repeatedly. It was all her doctors at Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital Stanford could do just to keep her alive. Soon, a far-flung team of researchers joined together to solve the mystery of what was causing Astrea’s severe heart arrhythmia.
How does a heart defect start? Stanford scientists use stem cells to find out
For years, pediatric cardiologists have been trying to understand the origin of a puzzling congenital defect that creates a spongy texture in the heart muscle wall. Now, Stanford researchers have shown that they can use stem cell techniques to turn donated skin and blood cells from real patients into a useful tool for figuring out how the disease gets started.
Does anorexia affect girls’ and boys’ bones differently? Probably not.
One serious consequence of anorexia nervosa is that it hurts patients’ bones, but until now most studies of patients’ bone health have been conducted in girls and women. A new Stanford study asked whether anorexia might affect boys’ bones differently.
Extra chemo drugs don’t improve treatment of rare bone cancer
A large clinical trial, published today in The Lancet Oncology, should spare young people with a rare bone cancer from the side effects of too much chemotherapy. Current treatments for osteosarcoma, a malignant bone tumor that usually affects teenagers, are less effective than doctors would like, so in recent years they’ve sometimes added extra chemotherapy drugs to the standard regimen.
Automating genetic analysis could speed diagnosis of rare diseases
Stanford researchers recently published a scientific study describing how and why they’re trying to automate the diagnosis of rare genetic diseases.
Kangaroo mother care: Researchers search for biological basis of its effectiveness
My niece just had a son. Despite the 110-degree summer heat, she has been holding him against her bare chest using a special newborn carrier because she knows kangaroo mother care is important. This bare skin, chest-to-chest contact has many demonstrated health benefits, and Stanford neonatologist Vinod Bhutani, MD, is now examining exactly how it works.
Bottle size may help explain extra weight gain in bottle-fed babies
Scientists who study childhood obesity often wonder how excess weight gain in kids can be prevented. Some experts suggest that prevention efforts should start in infancy, since formula-fed infants grow faster than those who are exclusively breast-fed. A study published this month in Pediatrics adds an interesting twist to the debate: The researchers found that babies fed with larger bottles between 2 and 6 months of age gained more weight.
Mom’s voice gets special recognition in many brain circuits, Stanford study finds
Children respond strongly to the sound of their mothers’ voices, but until now the brain circuitry involved has been a mystery. A new Stanford study changes that, showing that moms’ voices get special treatment in a far wider variety of their children’s brain areas than researchers expected.
Stanford researchers are getting closer to understanding prematurity predictors
Doctors would love to be able to predict and prevent preterm births. Right now, they mostly can’t. But research at the March of Dimes Prematurity Research Center at Stanford University is poised to change that.
New cystic fibrosis screening test developed at Stanford
Stanford researchers have invented a new technique to detect cystic fibrosis in infants. The test, described in a paper published today in The Journal of Molecular Diagnostics, is more comprehensive, faster and cheaper than current newborn screening methods.
Stanford ingenuity + big data = new insight into the ADHD brain
Attention-focusing brain networks interact more weakly than usual in kids with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, new Stanford research shows. The research, published online this week in Biological Psychiatry, is part of an ongoing effort to figure out how the brain differs from normal in people with ADHD.
California’s vaccination exemptions cluster in white, affluent communities
A new study by Stanford health-policy researcher Michelle Mello, PhD, JD, found the highest resistance to childhood vaccinations among white, affluent communities. In contrast to previous studies, however, Mello’s team did not find a correlation between higher levels of education and vaccine exemptions.
Cure is not enough for young cancer survivors
People that survive cancer at a young age are expected to live many decades after diagnosis and treatment, so they are the most vulnerable population to long-term damaging effects from cancer therapy. Stanford’s Karen Effinger, MD, MS, and Michael Link, MD, explore this issue in an editorial published today in JAMA Oncology.
A family’s story changes the science of a rare tumor
When Danah Jewett’s 5-year-old son, Dylan, was dying from a brain tumor in 2008, she wanted to know if there was anything her family could do to help other children who might someday face the same terrible diagnosis. Yes, said Dylan’s doctor, Michelle Monje, MD, PhD: Would you be willing to donate his tumor for cancer research after his death?
Helping newborns through song
Instead of drugs or fancy devices, a small village in India is using dhollak and dafali — drums traditional to the region — to spread awareness about post-natal care and to battle infant mortality. The effort started as part of a public-health research project led by Stanford global health expert Gary Darmstadt, MD.
The rocket men and their breathtaking invention
It’s a gadget straight out of Star Trek — a breath analyzer that may someday quickly and noninvasively detect everything from diabetes to cancers. In a new Stanford Medicine magazine story, you can read about how three Stanford rocket-combustion experts designed and tested a Breathalyzer-like device to measure toxic ammonia levels in critically ill children, all in about a year.
Why chronic disease harms kids’ bone development — and what to do about it
Mary Leonard, MD, is trying to make sure children with chronic diseases build as much bone as possible before puberty ends. Once that window closes, she and other researchers believe, it’s too late to do much about it. And the likely consequence of emerging from adolescence with inadequate bone mass is early osteoporosis.
Stanford Medicine magazine tells why a healthy childhood matters
I’ve forgotten most of my childhood experiences – which is perfectly normal. But apparently my body remembers many of those experiences – and I learned while editing the new Stanford Medicine magazine that’s normal too. The fall issue’s special report, “Childhood: The road ahead,” is full of stories of researchers realizing the impact early experiences can have on adult health. Some of their discoveries are surprising.
Maternal obesity increases risk for stillbirth, new Stanford study finds
Women who are obese when they become pregnant are more likely than other expectant mothers to have a stillborn baby. A new Stanford study gives the first detailed information about which obese women are at greatest risk and which stages of pregnancy are most likely to be affected.
Higher blood sugar in pregnancy tied to heart defects in baby, even if mom isn’t diabetic
For many years, doctors have known that women who had diabetes during pregnancy faced an increased risk of giving birth to a baby with a congenital heart defect. But now, for the first time, researchers have shown that the risk isn’t limited to women with diabetes.
Sunshine solves a life-threatening newborn health problem — with a little help from Stanford experts
In developing countries, well over 150,000 babies a year currently die or suffer severe brain damage from newborn jaundice. But that’s set to change, thanks to Stanford research that evaluated a safe, low-tech, inexpensive method for treating jaundice with filtered sunlight.
Rare gene variants help explain preemies’ lung disease, Stanford study shows
Because they’re born before their lungs are fully mature, premature babies are at risk for a serious lung disease. Over the last several decades, this disease, bronchopulmonary dysplasia, has evolved into both a great medical success story and a persistent mystery. But a new Stanford study, published this week, is helping clarify the mysterious part.
Girls with autism show behavior and brain differences compared to boys, Stanford study finds
Girls with autism tend to have less severe manifestations of one of the disorder’s core features, repetitive and restricted behavior, and they show brain-scan differences from boys that help explain the discrepancy, a new Stanford study has found.
Stanford team shows that one-on-one tutoring relieves math anxiety in children
Kids who suffer from anxiety about doing math problems can find relief in a program of one-on-one tutoring, which not only improves their math skills but also fixes abnormal responses in the fear circuits in their brains.
Stanford team uses brain scans to forecast development of kids’ math skills
Gray matter volume and connections between several brain regions better forecast 8-year-olds’ acquisition of math skills than their performance on standard math tests, a new Stanford neuroscience study has shown.
Stanford microbiome research offers new clues to the mystery of preterm birth
Premature birth affects 450,000 U.S. babies each year and is the leading cause of newborn deaths. But in about half of cases, doctors never figure out what triggered premature labor in the pregnant mom. Now, there’s a new clue.
Stanford doctors unraveling mysterious childhood psychiatric disease
A story in Sunday’s Wall Street Journal highlights Stanford’s leadership in treating a mystifying disease in which a child suddenly develops intense psychiatric problems, often after an infection. The disease, called pediatric acute-onset neuropsychiatric syndrome, can be terribly disabling, altering kids’ personalities, interfering with their school work and making it hard for families to function.
The worst disease you’ve never heard of: Stanford researchers and patients battle EB
Stanford recently launched the world’s first stem-cell based trial aimed at a devastating skin disease called epidermoloysis bullosa. Physicians from our dermatology team are trying to correct a faulty gene in the skin cells of patients with a severe form of the condition, which causes large, painful wounds and currently has no cure.
Cystic fibrosis is deadlier for Hispanic patients, Stanford study finds
A new Stanford study of all kids in California diagnosed with cystic fibrosis between 1991 and 2010 shows that Hispanic patients were three times as likely to die from the disease as their non-Hispanic counterparts, despite similar access to specialty care.
Teens confused about harms of marijuana and e-cigarettes, Stanford study finds
Today’s teenagers are familiar with the dangers of smoking conventional cigarettes, but they’re much less sure of the risks posed by marijuana and e-cigarettes, according to a Stanford study published this week in the Journal of Adolescent Health.
Study of outcomes for early preemies highlights complex choices for families and doctors
A tiny fraction of babies born at 22 weeks of gestation survive to childhood without major impairments or disabilities, according to a study recently published in the New England Journal of Medicine. But, although some of these babies can do well, there is variation between hospitals in the rate at which they are resuscitated after birth.
Existing drug shows early promise against deadly childhood brain tumor
An existing drug may help treat the deadliest form of childhood brain cancer, according to a Stanford-led study published this week in Nature Medicine. The findings are the first to show an effect of any FDA-approved drug on the cancer, which is called diffuse intrinsic pontine glioma.
Eye injuries in children from non-powder guns on the rise, new study says
Eye injuries from BB guns, pellet guns and other non-powder firearms have become more common in recent years in U.S. kids, according to a new study by Stanford pediatric ophthalmologist Douglas Fredrick, MD.
A serendipitous save that changed treatment of the most common tumor of infancy
Serendipity played a key role in the success of Isabella Manley’s treatment for a life-threatening tumor that made it difficult for her to breathe.
Reading, writing, arithmetic, and now, yoga
Integrating mindfulness into regular curriculum in the Ravenswood City School District
Dietary supplement helps lung function in cystic fibrosis patients, Stanford/Packard study finds
Life expectancy for people with cystic fibrosis has improved dramatically in the last few decades, but those with CF still struggle with a very basic action: breathing easily. However, a new study indicates that a specific dietary supplement might stave off the decline in lung function that characterizes this genetic disease.
Stanford/VA study finds link between PTSD and premature birth
Scientists have long suspected that post-traumatic stress disorder raises a pregnant woman’s risk of giving birth prematurely. Now, new research from Stanford and the U.S. Department of Veterans’ Affairs confirms these suspicions.
