Congenital Heart Imaging Programme (CHiP)
Research type
Research Study
Full title
Neurodevelopment from the fetus to childhood in individuals with congenital heart disease assessed using MRI
IRAS ID
291178
Contact name
Serena Counsell
Contact email
Duration of Study in the UK
5 years, 0 months, 1 days
Research summary
Congenital heart disease (CHD) describes heart problems that develop before birth, affecting almost 1 in 100 babies in the UK. Survival of infants with CHD has improved greatly over the past 50 years, due to advances in diagnostics and heart surgery. Despite this, children with CHD do worse at school, with up to half of children experiencing problems with movement, cognition, memory, hyperactivity, attention, speech and language skills. This presents a large and growing public health problem, whilst the underlying cause remains largely unknown.
The placenta is an organ that develops in the womb during pregnancy. It is the interface between mother and fetus and provides the fetus with oxygen and nutrients. We will compare the function of the placenta in CHD cases to healthy controls. We will also use ground-breaking MRI scans to examine their brains in unprecedented detail and will compare brain development in babies with CHD to healthy babies in the womb and after birth. We will undertake assessments in these children at 22 months so we can link our findings of placental function, brain development and outcome. We expect to find differences in placental function that help explain why some babies with CHD are more vulnerable to brain damage.
We will also investigate how parental stress and parenting styles are related to the children’s outcome at 22 months as it may be possible to modify these factors to help to improve the children’s outcome.
This study will improve our understanding of why brain development is altered in some children with CHD, explain why these children experience difficulties at school, and will enable us to identify those children who could benefit from interventions to improve outcome.
REC name
Wales REC 4
REC reference
21/WA/0075
Date of REC Opinion
8 Mar 2021
REC opinion
Favourable Opinion