(Press-News.org) Dr. Chani Traube, the Gerald M. Loughlin, MD Professor of Pediatrics at Weill Cornell Medicine, has been awarded a $3.4 million grant, with the possibility of extending to a total of $17 million over five years, from the National Institutes of Health, for a large-scale clinical trial called Optimizing Pain Treatment in Children on Mechanical ventilation (OPTICOM).
OPTICOM, funded by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, is part of the NIH’s HEAL KIDS PAIN initiative. The OPTICOM study will enroll 644 children in 14 pediatric intensive care units across the United States that are part of the institute’s Collaborative Pediatric Critical Care Research Network. This randomized clinical trial is designed to determine if adding acetaminophen or ketorolac, together or separately, to opioid-based pain control reduces pain in children with acute respiratory failure.
Dr. Traube’s co-principal investigators on the project are Dr. Michael Bell, chief of critical care medicine at Children’s National Medical Center, and Dr. Richard Holubkov, chief biostatistician for the Data Coordinating Center at the University of Utah School of Medicine.
“Critical care research often requires large-scale, multisite studies but pediatric research funding is hard to come by,” said Dr. Traube, who is also a pediatric critical care medicine specialist at NewYork-Presbyterian Komansky Children’s Hospital. “The HEAL KIDS PAIN Initiative will help us overcome these challenges.”
Each year 24,000 children in the United States develop acute respiratory failure and require invasive mechanical ventilation, with a tube inserted in their throats to help them breathe. These children receive opioid medications to help sedate them and reduce their pain. However, Dr. Traube noted that despite high-dose opioid exposure, 90% of the children still experience breakthrough pain.
She explained it can be challenging for clinicians and parents to recognize these pain episodes. The breathing tube prevents speech in children old enough to talk, and many of the children with respiratory failure are younger than 12 months old and not yet speaking. It can also be challenging for clinicians and parents to distinguish whether a child is experiencing pain, agitation or delirium. As a result, clinicians may treat any sign of discomfort with opioid medications. However, such escalating opioid use may cause excessive sedation, making pain detection even more difficult. It may also increase side effects like constipation, opioid dependence or withdrawal.
“It can become an unhappy cycle,” Dr. Traube said. “Despite huge exposure to opioids, most of these pediatric patients still experience pain.”
At NewYork-Presbyterian Komansky Children’s Hospital, Dr. Traube and her colleagues have developed a protocol for using acetaminophen and ketorolac with opioid medications to help improve patients’ pain control. They’ve found it helps reduce the amount of opioid medication administered, decreases the duration of mechanical ventilation and may help reduce delirium.
However, it is important not to generalize based on findings from a single ICU. The OPTICOM trial will leverage the infrastructure and expertise of the research network to optimize this approach in a nationally representative sample of children.
“If our multimodal approach to pain control is successful in the OPTICOM trial, we will have actionable information that can improve pediatric intensive care worldwide,” she explained. “These medications are inexpensive and readily available, and they have the potential to reduce side effects, decrease the duration of mechanical ventilation, and improve long-term patient outcomes.”
“I’m very excited about this opportunity to meaningfully assess how we can better treat pain in critically ill children,” Dr. Traube said.
This work will be funded by a grant from the National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, part of the National Institutes of Health, through grant number 1U01HD116260.
END
Weill Cornell Medicine receives grant to fund pain control research for critically ill children
2024-10-31
ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:
New partnerships to provide travel grants, coursework in genomic approaches to infectious disease for underrepresented aspiring physicians
2024-10-31
The Chan Zuckerberg Biohub San Francisco (CZ Biohub SF) and The 15 White Coats, Inc., have launched two initiatives that will provide travel grants as well as coursework in metagenomic sequencing and genomic epidemiology to aspiring physicians from underrepresented groups. CZ Biohub SF is one of a group of research institutes created and supported by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI).
The new initiatives are driven by CZ Biohub SF’s Rapid Response Team, which offers training, tools, and technologies to help build sustainable scientific relationships—with a special emphasis on the use of genomic sequencing platforms for pathogen discovery and detection—in laboratories ...
Off the clothesline, on the grid: MXene nanomaterials enable wireless charging in textiles
2024-10-31
The next step for fully integrated textile-based electronics to make their way from the lab to the wardrobe is figuring out how to power the garment gizmos without unfashionably toting around a solid battery. Researchers from Drexel University, the University of Pennsylvania, and Accenture Labs in California have taken a new approach to the challenge by building a full textile energy grid that can be wirelessly charged. In their recent study, the team reported that it can power textile devices, including a warming element and environmental sensors that transmit ...
How COVID-19 transformed family dinners
2024-10-31
WASHINGTON — While the lockdowns associated with the COVID-19 pandemic led many families to eat more meals at home, they had an additional benefit: an increase in the quality of family time during those dinners, according to research published by the American Psychological Association.
The study, published in the journal Couple and Family Psychology: Research and Practice, found that families who ate together more often during the pandemic also had more positive interactions, shared news and information, and even embraced technology such as videoconferencing ...
New ESO image captures a dark wolf in the sky
2024-10-31
For Halloween, the European Southern Observatory (ESO) reveals this spooktacular image of a dark nebula that creates the illusion of a wolf-like silhouette against a colourful cosmic backdrop. Fittingly nicknamed the Dark Wolf Nebula, it was captured in a 283-million-pixel image by the VLT Survey Telescope (VST) at ESO’s Paranal Observatory in Chile.
Found in the constellation Scorpius, near the centre of the Milky Way on the sky, the Dark Wolf Nebula is located around 5300 light-years from Earth. This image takes up an area in the sky equivalent to four full Moons, but is actually part of an even ...
New research reveals delayed evolutionary origin of Asteriidae sea stars
2024-10-31
A study published in PeerJ Life and Environment has reshaped our understanding of the evolutionary history of sea stars, particularly the family Asteriidae. The study, titled Phylogenetic and taxonomic revisions of Jurassic sea stars support a delayed evolutionary origin of the Asteriidae, introduces new findings that challenge longstanding assumptions about the evolutionary timeline of these marine invertebrates.
Sea stars of the superorder Forcipulatacea, comprising approximately 400 species, are integral ...
A paper-aluminum combo for strong, sustainable packaging
2024-10-31
Takeout containers get your favorite noodles from the restaurant to your dining table (or couch) without incident, but they are nearly impossible to recycle if they are made from foil-lined plastics. Research published in ACS Omega suggests that replacing the plastic layer with paper could create a more sustainable packaging material. The researchers used mechanical demonstrations and computer simulations to identify paper-aluminum laminate designs that won’t compromise on performance.
Protective packaging, like containers made ...
A novel neural network for preserving cultural heritage via 3D image reconstruction
2024-10-31
Relief carvings or relief sculptures are cultural heritage objects with figures that protrude from a background such as a wall or slab, creating a sense of depth. Commonly found at historical sites worldwide, these artworks are considered to be of immense historical and cultural value. Unfortunately, many such relief carvings at heritage sites across the world suffer from varying degrees of damage and deterioration over time. While modern 3D scanning and photogrammetry techniques can digitally preserve their current form, they cannot restore the original appearance of these carvings before damage. Additionally, traditional methods for restoring ...
Sleep apnea contributes to dementia in older adults, especially women
2024-10-31
A common yet underdiagnosed sleep disorder contributes to the development of dementia among adults — particularly women, a Michigan Medicine study suggests.
Investigators uncovered this by examining survey and cognitive screening data from more than 18,500 adults to determine the potential effect of known or suspected obstructive sleep apnea on the risk for dementia.
Obstructive sleep apnea is a chronic sleep disorder characterized by episodes disrupted or restricted breathing during sleep.
For all adults age 50 and older, having known obstructive sleep apnea or its symptoms — as people often do not know they have the problem ...
The silk thread that can turn clothes into charging stations
2024-10-31
Imagine a sweater that powers electronics to monitor your health or charge your mobile phone while running. This development faces challenges because of the lack of materials that both conduct electricity stably and are well suited for textiles. Now a research group, led by Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden, presents an ordinary silk thread, coated with a conductive plastic material, that shows promising properties for turning textiles into electricity generators.
Thermoelectric textiles convert temperature differences, for example between our bodies and the surrounding ...
Glaucoma drug shows promise against neurodegenerative diseases, animal studies suggest
2024-10-31
A drug commonly used to treat glaucoma has been shown in zebrafish and mice to protect against the build-up in the brain of the protein tau, which causes various forms of dementia and is implicated in Alzheimer’s disease.
Researchers in the UK Dementia Research Institute at the University of Cambridge screened more than 1,400 clinically-approved drug compounds using zebrafish genetically engineered to make them mimic so-called tauopathies. They discovered that drugs known as carbonic anhydrase inhibitors – of which the glaucoma drug methazolamide is one – clear tau build-up and reduce signs of the disease in zebrafish and mice carrying the mutant forms of tau ...