- Lectures / Webinars
- Defending Children's Brain Health
Defending Children's Brain Health
New
Lecturers: Prof Wang Tso Lee (Speaker), Pratibha Singhi (Speaker), Philip Pearl (Panelist), Biju Hameed (Panelist), Chahnez Triki (Moderator) & Ozlem Ersoy (FLICNA/Young Speaker)
When: Tuesday, July 22, 2025
Time: 09:00 AM Eastern Time ( US/ Canada )
About Topic:
Prof Wang-Tso Lee
Title: Defending Children's Brain Health
Children’s brain development is shaped by prenatal, perinatal, and postnatal factors. Prenatal risks include congenital infections and alcohol exposure; perinatal issues may involve birth-related insults; and postnatal challenges include poor nutrition and environmental stressors.
Pediatricians—especially pediatric neurologists—have a critical role in safeguarding brain health. This involves addressing prenatal risks, preventing perinatal injury, and ensuring a supportive, child-friendly environment. Let us work together to protect and enhance brain development, giving every child the healthiest start in life.
Learning Objective:
To know the risk factors affecting the children’s brain development and brain health, and the approach to get better brain health.
Pratibha Singhi
Protecting The Child’s Brain: A Shared Responsibility
The adult brain is essentially shaped by the myriads of experiences that the child’s brain undergoes during the most rapid stage of development i.e. the first 1000 days of life that are the most critical for brain development. During this time, millions of neural connections form, shaping learning, health, and behavior for life. Early brain injury, malnutrition, and lack of care can have lifelong adverse consequences. It is estimated that more than 200 million children under 5 years fail to reach their potential in cognitive development because of poverty, poor health and nutrition, and deficient care. Whereas the most disadvantaged children are seen in Sub Saharan Africa, the largest numbers live in South Asia.
On this World Brain Day let us get together and advocate for protecting and stimulating the child’s brain and for ensuring that every child’s brain gets the right environment to develop to its maximum potential. The ICNA webinar will highlight why protecting children’s brain health matters, and how professionals and paraprofessionals around the world can work together to ensure that every child has the best possible start. This needs to be a shared responsibility across various sectors and professionals and health care providers. By raising awareness, supporting families, and investing in prevention, we can help build a healthier future for all.
Phillip L. Pearl, M.D
Title: Preventing Neonatal Brain Injury Before Birth: Strategies for Safe Pregnancy
Preventing neonatal brain injury before birth involves maximal efforts to provide prenatal care, avoidance of teratogens (including alcohol, smoking, and drugs of abuse), maternal dietary supplements, and management of maternal health conditions, especially hypertension and diabetes. Maternal-fetal specialists are crucial in specific interventions, e.g. progesterone to prevent recurrent preterm birth, MgSO4 in pregnancies at risk of delivery before 32 weeks. Therapeutic hypothermia is established to improve outcomes following hypoxic-ischemic injury in term neonates. Future directions include banked umbilical cord blood, erythropoietin, and other investigational agents, with goals being to pursue agents having neuro-regenerative, angiogenic, anti-inflammatory, and anti-apoptotic effects. A genetic-environmental interdisciplinary care model, considering the exposome (which refers to an individual’s collective environmental exposures), genetic and epigenetic factors, and the maternal-placental-fetal triad, is being advanced as a conceptual framework to improve the brain health of successive generations.
Biju Hameed:
Title: Protecting Children’s Brains: How to Prevent Pediatric Brain Injury
özlem kosvalı
Title: Why Advocacy Begins With Us?
In this talk, we will emphasize how young doctors can participate in advocacy actions, cope with challenges in the community, and defend brain protection for every child. Illustrative vignets from our daily practise from prenatal period education programs to growing children’s safety issues and the stigmas that our patients encounters will be discussed.
As early career professionals let’s move together for a global initiative for protecting children’s brain. Even small advocacy moves can lead significant changes for a child-being.