Medal for baby brain injury treatment

Medal for baby brain injury treatment

Decades of research into understanding the impact and mechanisms of mild hypothermia treatment to reduce brain injury in newborn babies was recognised with the award of the Royal Societys MacDiarmid Medal this week.

University of Auckland Professor of Paediatrics and Physiology, Professor Alistair Jan Gunn was awarded the MacDiarmid Medal for his research into using brain cooling to prevent brain injury in babies who experience low oxygen at birth.

The MacDiarmid Medal is for outstanding scientific research which demonstrates potential for human benefit. He developed cooling cap to treat babies with brain injury at birth, and led research into the best way the technique could be used for optimum outcomes.

Professor Gunns mother, the late Professor Tania Gunn was herself an eminent paediatrician and neonatologist, specialising in the care of newborn babies. Together they carried out a pioneering randomised, safety study of head cooling for babies in New Zealand in the late nineties.

His ongoing experimental studies provided the foundation for understanding how, when and for which babies, the cooling cap can successfully reduce brain damage.

Professor Gunn has made a major contribution to perinatal physiology and neuroscience, says the MacDiarmid Medal selection panel.

This study established that therapeutic cooling was feasible and safe even in very sick newly born babies, and that simple bedside tests could identify babies who might benefit from treatment within an hour of birth.

Professor Gunn then developed and led a major international multicentre trial involving 25 perinatal centres and 234 babies in New Zealand, United States, Canada and the United Kingdom. This trial demonstrated that cooling could improve survival without disability in all but the most severely affected babies.

Follow ups when the children were 78 years of age confirmed the results, as have eight subsequent published trials carried out by others around the world. Mild cooling (therapeutic hypothermia) is now the standard of care for treating babies with brain injury due to low oxygen levels worldwide.

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Medal for baby brain injury treatment