Adolescents and Young Adults with Congenital Heart Defect: Accelerated Brain Aging and Neurocognitive Outcomes
Description: Congenital heart defect (CHD) is the most common birth defect that occurs in 1% of live births. Although 85% of CHD neonates survive into adulthood, about 50% of survivors develop neurodevelopmental impairments. Early interventions show promise to alleviate later neurocognitive impairment. However, a long overdue issue is to who to intervene. Ideally, those patients with higher risks to develop neurocognitive impairment in adulthood should undergo early intervention Nevertheless, current demographic or early brain MRI variable could only predict the risk for future neurocognitive impairment in one third of the patients. Emerging studies revealed signs of early onset of neurodegeneration and accelerated brain aging in adolescence and young adults with CHD (i.e., 8-30 years). This opens an immediate opportunity and a novel hypothesis that, if we can quantify the extent of the accelerated aging in adolescence and young adulthood, and if we can combine the extent of accelerated brain aging with demographics, socioeconomic and genetic factors, we may more accurately predict later-life neurocognitive outcomes than each factor alone, and than not using the extent of accelerated brain aging. We propose the first study to test this hypothesis, based on (1) our unique data, already collected by 2 NIH grants for over a decade, that offer comprehensive demographics, socioeconomic, genetic variables, and neurocognitive outcome data; (2) our big-data- and artificial-intelligence (AI)-driven novel and accurate algorithms that can quantify the extent of abnormal brain aging; and (3) our proposed innovative and rigorous study combining AI-quantified brain aging, demographics, socioeconomic, and genetic factors to predict neurocognitive outcomes. We will report the quantified accelerated brain aging, how it is related to age, sex, income, education and genetics, and publicly release our AI prediction algorithm and software. This first study will set a stage for future large-scale and time-course studies that will be my NIH K or R applications.
Funder: American Heart Association
Amount: $138,400
Funding type: fellowship
Funder scheme: Postdoctoral Fellowship
Start date: 2022-01-01
End date: 2023-12-31
Investigators: Mohammad Hussain, Mohammad Hussain
Institution: Boston Children's Hospital
Funded outputs count: 2
Funder award ID: 919799
OpenAlex ID: G4308676912