Grant: Project Grant

While steroids can be extremely effective at improving disease symptoms, they can also cause significant adverse effects that may show up only later in life. The administration of high-dose steroids to premature infants in the first week of life perfectly illustrates this point. This treatment decreases lung problems but at the same time causes higher rates of developmental problems. As a result of this knowledge, steroids are no longer used to treat premature infants to prevent lung problems. Despite these concerns in premature infants, steroids are commonly administered to normal infants for a trio of extremely common respiratory illnesses: croup, bronchiolitis and recurrent wheeze. While there are no reports of infants born at term suffering serious adverse effects from treatment with steroids, no careful long-term studies of children treated as infants with steroids in the first year of life have been carried out. We plan to study children 10 to 14 years of age who were treated with high-dose steroids as infants for bronchiolitis in the first year of life as part of a randomized trial conducted by us. We will assess children treated with steroids to determine if their IQ, academic achievement and general development is any different than those children not treated with steroids. Careful long-term follow-up of children later in life will allow us to know for sure if treatment of normal infants in the first year of life with steroids causes any significant developmental problems.