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Jenny Helen Kingsley Downs Leonard Wong BApplSci (physio) MSc PhD MBChB MPH MBBS, MPH, MMedStat Head, Child Disability Principal Research Fellow
The most common cause of morbidity and mortality in children with severe cerebral palsy (CP) is respiratory disease. BREATHE-CP (Better REspiratory and Airway Treatment and HEalth in Cerebral Palsy) is a multidisciplinary research team who have conducted research on the risk factors associated with CP respiratory disease, a systematic review on management and a Delphi study on the development of a consensus for the prevention and management of respiratory disease in CP.
Aneuploidies, and in particular, trisomies represent the most common genetic aberrations observed in human genetics today. To explore the presence of trisomies in historic and prehistoric populations we screen nearly 10,000 ancient human individuals for the presence of three copies of any of the target autosomes. We find clear genetic evidence for six cases of trisomy 21 (Down syndrome) and one case of trisomy 18 (Edwards syndrome), and all cases are present in infant or perinatal burials.
For individuals living with rare neurodevelopmental disorders, particularly those who are at the most severe end of the spectrum, standardized outcome measures may lack the sensitivity to capture small but meaningful changes.
Developmental Coordination Disorder (DCD) is a neurodevelopmental condition impacting motor skill acquisition and competence. While previous studies have identified adverse psychosocial outcomes in DCD, they are limited by small or population-screened, community-based samples.
Intensive rehabilitation aims to improve and maintain functioning in young people who experience disability due to illness or injury. Day rehabilitation may have advantages for families and healthcare systems over inpatient models of rehabilitation.
Developmental and epileptic encephalopathies (DEE) are rare, often monogenic neurodevelopmental conditions. Most affected individuals have refractory seizures. All have multiple severe impairments which can be as life-limiting as or more limiting than the seizures themselves. Mechanism- and gene-targeted therapies for these individually rare, genetic conditions hold hope for treatment, amelioration of disease expression, and even cure.
This study compared and explored the neurocognitive profiles of siblings of persons with and without neurodevelopmental conditions (NDCs) and associations between objective test performance and self-reported psychosocial functioning.
Children with cerebral palsy (CP) participate less in physical activities and have increased sedentary behaviour compared with typically developing peers. Participate CP is a participation-focused therapy intervention for children with CP with demonstrated efficacy in a phase II randomised controlled trial (RCT) to increase perceived performance of physical activity participation goals. This study will test the effectiveness of Participate CP in a multisite phase III RCT.
Rett syndrome (RTT) is a severe neurodevelopmental disorder associated with multiple neurobehavioral abnormalities. The Rett Syndrome Behaviour Questionnaire (RSBQ) was developed for pediatric RTT observational studies. Because its application has expanded to adult and interventional studies, we evaluated the RSBQ's psychometric properties in six pediatric (n = 323) and five adult (n = 309) datasets.