Citation

Mukai T, Galindo R, Coq JO. Front. Pediatr. 2023; 11(1210749): e1210749.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2023, Frontiers Media)

DOI

10.3389/fped.2023.1210749

PMID

37260792

PMCID

PMC10228205

Abstract

Neonatal and pediatric brain injuries have several causes, such as traumatic injury, stroke, hypoxic-ischemic encephalopathy (HIE), intraventricular hemorrhage (IVH), systemic inflammation and infection, and they place a great burden not only on the infant but also on the family. Several conventional therapies are used to treat brain injuries and their therapeutic effects have been established to a certain extent. However, complete neurological recovery is still difficult, and neurological sequelae often persist. Therefore, novel treatments are required to treat such injuries. Many basic research and clinical studies using new drugs, cell therapy, and rehabilitation/interventions have been conducted and their feasibility and efficacy have been reported. Recent advances in novel therapeutics are promising for the treatment of neonatal and pediatric brain injuries. Balanced and comprehensive expertise in developmental therapeutics is required to provide appropriate treatment for neonates and children. The purpose of this special issue was to conduct research on new therapeutics for neonatal and pediatric brain injuries in the seeding stage, which is key to new treatment strategies that can be developed into clinical research in the future. This issue also aims to bring together basic and clinical evidence for many of the treatments currently underway for brain injury to establish a more robust treatment protocol.

For basic research to understand the mechanism of HIE, Zen et al. elucidated that the ambient temperature is useful for creating a rodent model with the appropriate severity of targeted neuropsychological symptoms to establish a novel therapy for HIE. The pathophysiology of HIE has been previously studied in several rodent models to develop novel treatments (1). Although it is well known that a high ambient temperature results in severe HIE (2), the effect of subtle changes in ambient temperature during a hypoxic-ischemic insult has not been fully studied. Zen et al. revealed that even a small gradual change of 0.5°C produced significant differences in pathological and behavioral changes and contributed to the accumulation of microglia. This basic HIE experimental animal model is very important for future clinical applications...

Language: en

Keywords

pediatric brain injury; traumatic brain injury; hypoxic-ischemic encephalopathy; neonatal brain injury; stroke