Perinatal brain damage and long-term outcome in preterm infants
Perinatal brain damage and long-term outcome in preterm infants
 Professor Olaf Dammann
Perinatal Infectious Disease Epidemiology Unit
Department of Obstetrics and Pediatrics
Hannover Medical School, Hannover, Germany
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Biography
Professor Olaf Dammann studied medicine in Lübeck and Hamburg, Germany. He was a Clinical Associate in the Department of
Paediatrics, University Hospital Hamburg-Eppendorf, from 1991 until 1995. His major interest was in neuropaediatrics and neonatology. From 1990 until 1995, he was a collaborator in the Hamburg Very-Low-Birthweight
Study, supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft. In 1995, he began a Research Fellowship in neuroepidemiology at the Children’s Hospital, Boston, USA, and obtained a Master’s Degree in epidemiology at the Harvard School of Public Health in 1997. He continues his work at the Neuroepidemiology Unit at Harvard Medical School as an Assistant Professor in neurology, while serving at Hannover Medical School as the Wilhelm-Hirte Associate Professor in perinatal infectious disease epidemiology. His research interests include the identification of risk factors for brain damage in newborns.
Abstract
For many years, the acute and chronic morbidities in infants born much before term were attributed to immaturity. During the past decade, however, abundant evidence has supported the hypothesis that what initiates the preterm delivery contributes towards these morbidities. Most of the evidence points to an intrauterine infection/inflammation that precedes, rather than accompanies, preterm labour and prelabour preterm rupture of membranes. The inflammatory responses of the fetus to these stimuli are among the strongest predictors of the acute and chronic morbidities of lung and brain. The apparent reduced risk of acute and chronic lung and brain morbidities in infants born to mothers with severe pregnancy-induced hypertension may reflect nothing more than the relative absence of a maternal infection as a cause of preterm delivery. In this presentation, we review the
associations between initiators of prematurity and short-term, as well as
long-term, disorders of the lung and brain in preterm infants. We suggest that
future research should integrate basic scientific and epidemiological methods to
further characterise the association between antenatal risk factors on long-term
pulmonary and cerebral outcome in preterm infants.
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