Defending Children's Brain Health

Lecturers: Prof Wang Tuo 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 )

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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.

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.