How Does SCD Impact Brain Growth in Infants?

Ellen Grant, MD; Jason Sutin, PhD; and Ivy Lin, PhD, from the Fetal Neonatal Neuroimaging and Developmental Science Center at Boston Children’s Hospital in Massachusetts discuss the results of their pilot study investigating cerebral hemodynamics in infants with sickle cell disease (SCD).

“We started the study because the concern in SCD has always been strokes, but this is at older ages,” Dr. Sutin said. “We wondered, ‘when do the effects of SCD first manifest to cerebral health?’ Technology, especially diffuse correlation spectroscopy, gave us an opportunity to look at this at the early stages when it’s hard to get [magnetic resonance imaging] or even transcranial Doppler.”

The study was enabled by a novel imaging tool developed at the Fetal Neonatal Neuroimaging and Developmental Science Center.

“We specialize in developing noninvasive tools we can use to monitor a baby’s brain hemodynamics in the context of brain injury or disease progression, or even with their recovery from treatment,” Dr. Ivy explained. “We originally developed this tool for infants in the intensive neonatal unit care, and in our previous research we found monitoring hemodynamics, especially in the context of blood flow and oxygen metabolism, can predict later outcomes after discharge from the hospital.”

The first preliminary data from their follow-up study on infants with SCD were presented at the 65th American Society of Hematology Annual Meeting & Exposition.

“We started the study like [Dr. Sutin] mentioned in sickle cell patients because most of the research is focusing on the incidence of stroke, which will happen much later,” Dr. Grant said. “There’s really a lack of any type of cerebral monitors to monitor their hemodynamic stress, which could potentially be an early marker of stroke.”