Grant: Project Grant

Preterm babies have many serious health concerns; particularly they are prone to central nervous system injury very early in development. Blindness, secondary to eye injury, and cerebral palsy, secondary to brain injury, are important examples. Providing optimal nutrition helps preterm babies grow normally and have closer to normal eye and brain development. However, many of these babies are simply too immature to be fed by any other way than by intravenous nutrition, which as we will explain may be far from optimal. This problem is called intestinal failure and preterm infants are the highest risk group for prolonged use of parenteral nutrition due to their immaturity and their risk for other conditions that cause intestinal failure. Our preliminary results show that the intravenous fats we feed these high risk babies negatively impacts brain growth and eye function. We studied newborn piglets, a surrogate model for preterm babies, who are often too sick for research studies. Preterm babies require key fats in their diet for normal eye and brain growth and function. The current research study will show that the intravenous fat products available, and used for preterm babies in Canada, do not contain sufficient amounts of these fats. Most importantly, we will test adding different amounts of the key fats to the intravenous product traditionally used for babies and show that this improves eye and brain function in our piglet model. We believe that no currently available commercial fat product has the necessary amounts of these key fats for the optimal eye and brain development of preterm babies. Hence, this research is both novel and very important as the cost of visual problems and brain injuries is extremely high for preterm babies, their families and for our society.