The ICONIC study
Research type
Research Study
Full title
The Impact of congenital heart disease on neurodevelopment in childhood
IRAS ID
305016
Contact name
Serena Counsell
Contact email
Sponsor organisation
King's College London
Duration of Study in the UK
4 years, 1 months, 31 days
Research summary
Congenital heart disease (CHD) describes heart problems that develop before birth, affecting almost 1 in 100 babies in the UK. Survival of infants with CHD has improved greatly over the past 50 years, due to advances in diagnostics and heart surgery. Despite this, children with CHD do worse at school, with up to half of children experiencing problems with movement, cognition, memory, hyperactivity, attention, speech and language skills. This presents a large and growing public health problem, whilst the underlying cause remains largely unknown.
We will study 6-8 year old children who have CHD and healthy control children. The children will have a brain MRI and we will test their ability to perform a number of different tasks, which will highlight any problems they may have with cognition, attention, behaviour and how well they can interact with their families and other people. We undertook brain MRI scans when these children were babies and we will see how their brain development just after they were born is related to how well they perform on these tasks.
We will also investigate how parental stress and parenting styles are related to the children's outcome at 6-8 years as it may be possible to modify these factors to help to improve the children's outcome.
This study will improve our understanding of why brain development is altered in some children with CHD, explain why these children experience difficulties at school, and will enable us to identify those children who could benefit from interventions to improve outcome. Provision of effective interventions to protect brain health in these children at an early stage will help place vulnerable children onto healthy developmental trajectories, hence avoiding severe distress to children and their families and expense to society at large.REC name
Wales REC 5
REC reference
22/WA/0014
Date of REC Opinion
25 Jan 2022
REC opinion
Favourable Opinion