The development of human cortical networks: effects of early life stress and injury

许多婴儿出生时太小或太小，或患有严重的疾病。因此，这些婴儿将需要在医院度过一段时间，并接受许多临床程序，其中许多是痛苦的。即使是最小的早产儿也能表现出对疼痛的行为反应，但我们不知道他们的大脑处理了多少疼痛。这很重要，因为大脑负责疼痛的实际感觉：疼痛的程度，疼痛的位置以及疼痛的程度。我们的研究旨在发现这一点，以便预防或充分治疗婴儿疼痛。人们认为，在大脑仍在形成连接的早期，过多的伤害和压力会改变大脑中疼痛通路的正常发育，但人们对这一过程知之甚少。我们打算通过独立测量大脑活动、组织损伤和生理应激，并分析它们在重症监护中如何相互影响来澄清这一点。最后，由于每个婴儿都是一个个体，我们需要知道婴儿大脑中的疼痛通路有何不同，以及造成这些差异的因素是什么。我们的工作将有助于确保每个住院婴儿得到适当的疼痛缓解。

Many infants are born too young or too small or with serious medical conditions. As a result, these infants will need to spend time in hospital and undergo numerous clinical procedures, many of which are painful. While even the youngest preterm infant can show behavioural reactions to pain, we do not know how much the pain is processed in their brain. This is important because the brain is responsible for the actual feeling of pain: how much it hurts, where it is and how unpleasant it is. Our research aims to discover this so that infant pain can be prevented or adequately treated. Too much injury and stress in early life, when the brain is still forming connections, is thought to alter normal development of pain pathways in the brain, but this process is poorly understood. We intend to clarify this by measuring brain activity, tissue injury and physiological stress independently and analysing how they influence each other in intensive care. Finally, since each infant is an individual, we need to know how pain pathways in the brain differ between infants and what factors are responsible for these differences. Our work will help ensure that each hospitalised infant receives appropriate pain relief.