Current Research

Updated January 3, 2011

The work of the Center for Infant Pulmonary Disorders at CMH is supported generously by the proceeds of the Endowment. Importantly, each and every one of the funds donated supports work that is both beyond the usual scope of everyday patient care at the hospital and contributing to research and scholarly work that is the equal of that done anywhere in comparable nurseries and research labs. Dr. Truog is always fulfilling the promise of doing work that will be helpful to doctors, researchers, families and of course infants and children both in our own community and beyond. That means performing and publishing research that is supported by these dedicated funds and that itself contributes to the ability to obtain other external funds. In Sept 2009, CMH and Dr. Truog were successful in obtaining funding from the NIH to design, undertake and eventually complete a large clinical trial conducted in 20 large nurseries in the US to study a promising new use of an older class of medications to improve pulmonary outcomes for extremely preterm infants. Whatever they find will be very helpful in guiding care for these most vulnerable infants.

The early promising work that led to the funding and we hope completion of this study was supported by local funds—obviously including the Cooper Connor Endowment. It is in this way that internal investments grow into larger, especially government funding, for major projects.

Dr. Truog, his colleagues and CMH have published more work in this past year. In addition, in 2010, they created an unusual if not unique specialized team in the CMH nursery to provide more integrated and comprehensive diagnosis and management of very high risk infants with chronic pulmonary problems—both preterm and full term infants. CMH is an active referral center for these difficult to manage patients who come from the metropolitan area and from intensive care facilities in Kansas and western Missouri. Doctors from CMH provide continuing care, including (if needed) home ventilation, so that money can be saved and care can be made easier for the families. It's a big undertaking and itself is of interest to others in the US. In addition to being uniquely helpful for these infants, the team provides a mechanism for systematically testing useful new approaches for prevention of the very conditions we are trying to treat. Thus, patient care, and research go hand in hand as they should for such complex and costly medical problems. The long-term outcomes for these infants appear very promising.

An unhappy pattern of practice in newborn medicine is to utilize promising therapies that seem to work for older children or adults, but which do not get well tested in young infants before widespread use—sometimes with unanticipated adverse outcomes. One of the current efforts in the Center is to take a hard look at some of the practices, especially around medications and ventilators, to better understand their limits and benefits of their use.

We look forward to more promising news mid-2011.