Have an update to share? Research news, milestones, funding announcements, and events can be submitted via the Research Communications request form. In addition to the monthly newsletter, Manne Research Institute distributes a bi-weekly "Events and Opportunities" email featuring upcoming events, including virtual and in-person educational opportunities, and relevant research deadlines. All previous updates can be found in the Research Communications archive.

The Office of Research Development is pleased to share an updated Manne Research Institute Facilities, Equipment, and Environment language template. Investigators are encouraged to use this template when preparing a funding proposal and tailor it to include those sections that are relevant to their application in collaboration with the Office of Sponsored Programs (OSP). If you need assistance connecting with your designated OSP team member, contact [email protected]. You can access this template and other institutional resources on the OSP Resources webpage.

We will continue to review and update this template language on a quarterly basis, or as needed, and encourage you to contact [email protected] with questions or to recommend additional information for inclusion. 

NUCATS On Demand is a digital tool that provides 24-hour access to training and other educational resources for research staff and faculty. NUCATS On Demand features:

Senior Statistician, Quantitative Science 

Daniella Espinoza recently joined the Office of Research Development as a Research Educator. Her previous professional experience includes serving as an Education Programs Coordinator at the Chicago Academy of Sciences/Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum and as a Science Teacher in two high schools in Chicago. Currently, Espinoza is a volunteer clinical research assistant in the Department of Internal Medicine at Rush University Medical Center where she works on the Division of Allergy and Immunology’s Food Allergy Outcomes Related to White and African American Racial Differences (FORWARD) study. She recently earned an MS in Biotechnology from Rush University. She also earned an MA in Teaching from Relay Graduate School of Education and a BA in Biology with minors in Spanish and Psychology from Eckerd College, where she was honored with the James H. Robinson Award for her contributions to the minority experience and increasing the appreciation of cross-cultural values across the campus.

Senior Statistician, Quantitative Science  

Ya Tuo was recently named Senior Statistician of Quantitative Science. Previously, Tuo was a biostatistician in the Biomedical Statistics Research Core at the Larner College of Medicine at the University of Vermont. She received her MS in Statistics from the University of Vermont.

Yongchao Ma Awarded $3.9M National Institutes of Health Grant

Yongchao Ma, PhD, Children’s Research Fund Professorship in Neurobiology at Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago, recently received a $3.9 million grant from the National Institutes of Health. The grant will fund work investigating the regulation of neuroinflammation and cell death induced by mitochondrial DNA, which has broad implications for neurodegenerative diseases and brain development.

Dr. Ma, who is also an Associate Professor of Pediatrics, Neurology, and Neuroscience at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, is the lead Principal Investigator of this multi-PI grant. He will collaborate with Dr. Shenyu Yang from Penn State College of Medicine and Dr. Xiongwei Zhu from Case Western Reserve University.

The grant has been reviewed and approved for five years and will be awarded in two phases. The first phase of three years ($2.3 million) has been received by Lurie Children’s. The second phase of two years ($1.6 million) will be awarded once the progress report is received by the NIH program officer.

As Director of the Ma Laboratory at Lurie Children’s, Dr. Ma is leading research efforts that are making breakthroughs in the understanding of developmental and neurodegenerative diseases, including spinal muscular atrophy (SMA), autism, ALS, and Alzheimer’s.

Aalaa Abdallah Named Recipient of the Mary J.C. Hendrix Outstanding Graduate Student Award 

Stanley Manne Children’s Research Institute is pleased to announce that Aalaa Abdallah, MS, a PhD candidate and Master of Public Health student at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, received the Mary J.C. Hendrix Outstanding Graduate Student Award.

Abdallah will receive a $5,000 award prize to support her research and attendance at scientific conferences. She works in the lab of Xiao-Nan Li, MD, PhD, Rachelle and Mark Gordon Endowed Professorship in Cancer Research at Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago and a Professor of Pediatrics at Feinberg School of Medicine. The subject of Abdallah’s research is the G34R molecular variant of pediatric high-grade gliomas (pHGG). So far, she has developed and characterized a novel murine model of G34R pHGG. Going forward, she aims to use basic science and translational methods to elucidate the biochemical mechanisms underlying G34R pHGG pathogenesis and progression.

The Mary J.C. Hendrix Outstanding Graduate Student Award is made possible through the ongoing generosity of the Children’s Research Fund. One award is given each year to a Manne Research Institute graduate student for their high level of scholastic achievement, research engagement, and productivity.

The Gerber Foundation recently awarded Seth Goldstein, MD, MPhil, Attending Physician of Pediatric Surgery at Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago, a research grant to continue funding later stages of his research to improve timely diagnosis for infants with ischemia. Ischemia—inadequate blood supply or oxygen delivery to an organ—causes a number of injuries in newborn infants that can lead to permanent disability or death. Necrotizing enterocolitis of the intestines and hypoxic ischemic encephalopathy, which affects the brain, are the most common ischemic diseases in neonates. These diseases affect more than 10,000 infants per year in the United States, and the mortality rates of both is more than 25 percent. The timely diagnosis of ischemia is challenging as necrotizing enterocolitis and hypoxic ischemic encephalopathy lack specific biomarkers and point-of-care imaging findings. The research grant will help support Dr. Goldstein’s work at developing a noninvasive device that will better detect these two diseases and improve outcomes for infants.

Congratulations to Priya Tripathi, Research Educator for the Office of Research Development, for receiving an Honorable Mention in the 9th Annual Exhibit and Awards of the National Arts Program for Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago. The program features artwork submitted by Lurie Children’s employees, physicians, and their families. Awards were presented to artists across several categories. Artwork is on display along the staff corridors on the 11th floor of the main hospital through April 2023.

In the Chicago area, pediatric mental health Emergency Department (ED) visits increased 27 percent at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, followed by a 4 percent increase monthly through February 2021, according to a study from Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago published in the journal Academic Pediatrics. The authors found increased ED visits for suicide, self-injury and disruptive behaviors, as well as higher admission rates for these children.

“During the pandemic, we found fewer ED visits for depression and anxiety and more visits for suicide or self-injury,” said lead author Lavanya Shankar, MD, MS, a hospitalist at Lurie Children’s and Health System Clinician of Pediatrics at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. “Our findings suggest that emergency care is increasingly reserved for more severe cases of mood disorders involving risk of self-harm. We also found increased pediatric ED visits for disruptive, impulse control and conduct disorders, which may have worsened because of inability to access outpatient services or because of psychosocial stressors imposed by the pandemic.”

The study analyzed mental health ED visits by children age 5–17 years in the Chicago area from March 2018 to March 2021 at a 10-hospital academic medical system (one academic medical hospital and nine community hospitals) and Lurie Children’s.

“Our study is unique in its examination of trends in pediatric mental health ED visits at community hospitals,” said senior author Jennifer Hoffmann, MD, Emergency Medicine physician at Lurie Children’s and Assistant Professor of Pediatrics at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. “We observed a relative increase in the proportion of children presenting to community hospitals compared to a children’s hospital and academic medical ED. Given that most pediatric emergency care occurs at non-children’s hospitals and the declaration of a national emergency in pediatric mental health by the American Academy of Pediatrics, all EDs should be equipped with adequate resources, policies, and staff training to manage pediatric mental health needs.”

Most children and adolescents living in the U.S. have suboptimal scores for cardiovascular health (CVH), according to the first study to use the American Heart Association’s new “Life’s Essential 8” metrics and scoring algorithm for quantifying CVH levels in adults and children. Overall, under 30 percent of 2–19-year-olds had high CVH. The proportion of children with high CVH declined markedly with older age: 56 percent of 2–5-year-old children had high CVH, compared with 33 percent of 6–11-year-olds and 14 percent of 12–19-year-olds. Findings were published in the journal Circulation.

“We found that among U.S. children, scores were lowest for the diet metric, which is comparable to what we saw in adults,” said senior author Amanda Marma Perak, MD, a cardiologist at Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago and Assistant Professor of Pediatrics at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. “Individuals and families who improve their eating patterns can markedly improve their total cardiovascular health, even independent of weight change. In addition to families’ efforts to improve, we also need policy-level support for better diets, such as subsidies for fruit and vegetable production or making healthier foods more readily available and removing sugar-sweetened beverage options in schools.”

The updated CVH definition includes eight components – sleep duration, a newly added metric, plus refined versions of the original seven metrics including diet, physical activity, nicotine exposure, body mass index (BMI), blood lipids, blood glucose, and blood pressure. For this study, researchers used data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Surveys (NHANES) from 2013 to 2018. There were 13,521 adult and 9,888 child participants, representing over 201 million adults and over 74 million children in the U.S. Only three CVH metrics (diet, physical activity and BMI) were available in NHANES for all children ages 2 to 19 years. More metrics were added with increasing age—lipids starting at age 6 years, blood pressure starting at age 8 years, nicotine and glucose at age 12 years and sleep at age 16 years.

“Maintenance of higher cardiovascular health at all ages is associated with extremely favorable health outcomes,” said Dr. Marma Perak, who was the pediatric expert for the simultaneously published American Heart Association Presidential Advisory that redefined the concept of CVH through the new metrics. “Children with high CVH have lower burdens of subclinical cardiovascular disease in mid-life. And for children who manage to maintain high CVH into late adolescence or young adulthood, their risk for premature clinical cardiovascular disease events over the next 30 years is extremely low. Ultimately, the new measures of CVH will allow clinicians and scientists to track changes with more precision so that they can intervene earlier and set kids on a healthier path into adulthood.”

Research at Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago is conducted through Stanley Manne Children’s Research Institute. Manne Research Institute is focused on improving child health, transforming pediatric medicine and ensuring healthier futures through the relentless pursuit of knowledge. Lurie Children’s is ranked as one of the nation’s top children’s hospitals by U.S. News & World Report. It is the pediatric training ground for Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine.

Pediatric Emergency Department (ED) encounters related to physical abuse decreased by 19 percent during the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a multicenter study published in the journal Pediatrics. While encounter rates with lower clinical severity dropped during the pandemic, encounter rates with higher clinical severity remained unchanged. This pattern raises concern for unrecognized harm, as opposed to true reductions in child abuse.

“Although our results show a decrease in ED encounters for physical abuse in children, especially for cases with lower clinical severity, it is unclear if this indicates an actual decrease in child abuse during the pandemic,” said senior author Elizabeth Alpern, MD, MSCE, Division Head of Emergency Medicine at Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago and Professor of Pediatrics at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. “With so many kids attending school remotely, abuse might not have been easily detected by school personnel. Also, children with less severe injuries might not have been brought for in-person medical care during the pandemic. We need further investigation to understand the true reasons behind our results.”

Dr. Alpern and colleagues found that the greatest reduction in ED encounters for physical abuse concerns were in preschool children, followed by school-aged children.

The study used data from the Pediatric Emergency Care Applied Research Network. Encounters related to child physical abuse were identified by three methods: child physical abuse diagnoses among all ages, age-restricted high-risk injury diagnosis codes, or age-restricted skeletal survey completion. The primary outcomes were encounter rates per day and clinical severity before (January 2018–March 2020) and during the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic (April 2020–March 2021).

Research at Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago is conducted through Stanley Manne Children’s Research Institute. Manne Research Institute is focused on improving child health, transforming pediatric medicine and ensuring healthier futures through the relentless pursuit of knowledge. Lurie Children’s is ranked as one of the nation’s top children’s hospitals by U.S. News & World Report. It is the pediatric training ground for Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. Emergency medicine-focused research at Lurie Children’s is conducted through the Grainger Research Program in Pediatric Emergency Medicine.

The COVID-19 pandemic has produced unprecedented challenges for families, resulting in markedly increased levels of stress for Chicago parents, according to the latest study by Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago.

The survey from the hospital’s Voices of Child Health in Chicago found:

Parents have faced a slew of challenges during the pandemic including unemployment, remote learning for their children’s school, inadequate and expensive food supplies, lack of in-school socialization, increased responsibilities at home and new concerns about their family’s health. Correspondingly, the majority of respondents in this latest citywide survey indicated substantially rising stress levels (51 percent) since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, 37 percent of parents said their stress levels remained the same and 12 percent said their stress levels decreased.

Mothers reported heightened levels of stress compared with fathers: 56 percent of mothers said their stress had increased since the start of the pandemic, compared to 43 percent of fathers. The survey also revealed that parents in Chicago with lower household incomes, lower educational levels, and who are Black or Latinx were most likely to report increased levels of stress. This finding aligns with the fact that these groups have been disproportionately affected by the pandemic.

“With over half of Chicago parents in our survey reporting increased stress since the start of the pandemic, it is crucial that we work together as a community to support parents and families and address their mental health and well-being,” said Marie Heffernan, PhD, Assistant Professor at Lurie Children’s and Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, who directs the Voices of Child Health in Chicago survey.

As reported by the U.S. Surgeon General, the pandemic’s impact on young people has created a pediatric mental health crisis. This Chicago survey illustrates how the crisis is also taking a tremendous toll on parents. Parents who had at least one child showing symptoms of behavioral and emotional difficulties—such as anxiety, trouble focusing or depression—were significantly more likely to report that their own stress had also increased (59 percent), compared with parents who did not have a child showing such symptoms.

Living through uncertainties caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus, parents in the survey showed significant worry about how the pandemic will play out. Sixty-five percent indicated that they were worried a new variant will make the pandemic worse in Chicago and the United States, 63 percent said they were very concerned their children would contract the virus, 61 percent were stressed that other family members or friends would get sick from a new variant, and 52 percent worried that their child might have to return to remote learning.

This report is based on data from the Voices of Child Health in Chicago Parent Panel Survey. The survey is administered to a sample of Chicago parents by Lurie Children’s and NORC at the University of Chicago via internet and telephone. The survey is administered to Chicago parents three times each year. The data in this report was collected from October through November 2021. The sample consisted of 1,142 Chicago parents, step-parents, or guardians who had at least one child under 18 years of age in the household (referred to as “parents” in this report). Parents participated from all 77 community areas in Chicago. For more information about the VOCHIC Parent Panel Survey, visit luriechildrens.org/ParentPanel and the page on Open Science Framework at https://osf.io/cjz82/.

Population-focused child health research at Lurie Children’s is conducted through the Mary Ann & J. Milburn Smith Child Health Outcomes, Research, and Evaluation Center at Stanley Manne Children’s Research Institute. Manne Research Institute is focused on improving child health, transforming pediatric medicine and ensuring healthier futures through the relentless pursuit of new knowledge. Lurie Children’s is ranked as one of the nation’s top children’s hospitals in U.S. News & World Report and is the pediatric training affiliate for Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. Last year, the hospital served more than 223,000 children from all 50 states, Washington D.C. and Puerto Rico, and 37 countries.

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