Below, you’ll find some of the 2022 highlights of the research done by faculty and staff at Children’s of Alabama and the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB). For a look at the full scope of our research, check out our Academic Annual Report or visit Insidepeds.org.
When a cluster of Alabama children were diagnosed with severe hepatitis in the fall of 2021, pediatric physicians at Children’s and UAB notified public health leaders and began investigating. As a result of their efforts, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) issued a health alert to warn the public about the spread of the illness. Over the next few months, hundreds more cases were discovered across the United States and Europe, many with a common link: adenovirus within the blood. Researchers at Children’s and UAB discovered the link in the Alabama cases through a routine screening. The results of the research done by hepatologists Helena Gutierrez, M.D., and Henry Shiau, M.D., along with infectious disease physician Markus Buchfellner, M.D., were published in the New England Journal of Medicine. Multiple national media outlets interviewed the researchers in the spring of 2022 about the outbreak.
Children’s pediatric neurologist Michael Lopez, M.D., Ph.D., received a Career Development Award worth nearly $1 million from the National Institute of Neurologic Disorders and Stroke to better understand a novel pathway involved in the development and progression of Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD). The disease is caused by a mutation in the gene that encodes for the dystrophin protein and can cause muscles to degrade over time, resulting in a severe paralysis that affects breathing and eventually causes the heart to fail. The grant will enable Lopez and his team to study a new pathway involved in the sustained inflammation that underlies the disease.
In a study published in JAMA Pediatrics, a group of 15 hospitals, including doctors from Children’s and UAB, found that a ‘practice bundle’ strategy can reduce the number of in-hospital cardiac arrests (IHCA) among children in cardiovascular intensive care units (CICUs). In the study, born out of a pilot study developed at Children’s of Alabama and led by physicians at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital, the participating hospitals implemented the five-part strategy within their CICUs, analyzing data after 12 months and again after 18 months. The result was an average decrease of 30% in the number of in-hospital cardiac arrests at the hospitals.