Doctoral/Diploma thesis in neonatal neurology
Topic
We offer several topics, all of them are dedicated to reduce perinatal brain damage by either neuroprotective or neuroregenerative strategies.
Work in a nice team in our lab !
Duration
1 year
Contact
For a personal talk please contact Dr. Elke Griesmaier by mail (elke.griesmaier@i-med.ac.at)
Background
Neurodevelopmental delay and lifelong handicaps is one of the major problemes remaining in preterm infants. Depending on the birthweight 20% to 50% of these infants suffer from severe motor disabilities and cognitive deficits. Aside from the socioeconomic effect with high costs for the health care system the neurological adverse outcome is a severe burden to the child and to the parents. The cause of this severe motor disabilities and cognitive deficits was contributed to be a consequence of the damage of white matter tissue within the brain. But it gets more and more clear that preterm babies with damage of white matter have also a disturbance of grey matter development. So children which were born preterm have siginificant less grey matter volume than their aged matched controls. So it is speculated that the cognitive deficits observed in these children might not only be due to the damage of white matter itself but furthermore due to a change in structural brain development like altered connectivity with the consequence of functional cognitive deficits. This hypothesis is founded on new knowlegde about the pathogenesis of brain damage in preterm infants which have been emerged the last years. The pathophysiology of brain damage in preterm infants is multifactorial. Our research is comitted to reduce perinatal brain damage in newborns.