Rainbow channels $52 million in funding into more than 175 clinical studies and ranks among the top pediatric programs in the country. Our investigators are leaders in their fields and direct nationally recognized research programs in a number of areas, including: - Developmental neurotoxicity, particularly exposure to toxins that occur during the prenatal period
- High intensity exercise and the role of cardiopulmonary training in children and adolescents with heart defects
- The Center for Inflammatory Bowel Disease, which includes basic and translational research programs focused on this disease
- Diabetes including its prevention, treatment, complications and management
- Environmental lung disease in the inner city
- How white blood cells respond to bacteria in the lungs in lung disease, particularly pneumonia
- Identifying polymorphisms in proteins that modify the course of cystic fibrosis
- Developmental outcomes and therapeutic interventions in low birth weight premature infants
- Malaria and the epidemiology of host antibody responses
- Genetics of language disorders
- Respiratory neuro biology, which takes a bench-to-bedside approach in studying breathing control and disordered breathing in premature infants
- Metabolic effects of therapies commonly used to help patients with HIV infection and AIDS
- Reproductive endocrinology, particularly the genetic regulation of the onset of puberty and the assessment of disorders of puberty
- Developmental neurophysiology, which is particularly focused on fetal and neonatal development and the immature brain
- Sleep-disordered breathing, obesity and asthma
- Growth disorders, including diagnosis and treatment
- Obesity in childhood
- Amulticenter trial to determine how to reduce the incidence of bronchopulmonary dysplasia in premature infants
- Cardiac development and congenital heart defects, particularly the formation of the large vessels leading to the organs
| Through our Center for International Child Health, Rainbow has taken on the challenge of changing the future well being of children in Third World countries. One of the first programs of its kind, this effort proves that training pediatricians to care for children in their own countries may be the best humanitarian effort in the fight to prevent disease and human suffering and to aid in prosperity. As part of the Center, we launched the nation’s first and only International Health Track for pediatric residents in 1989. The program, which attracts top medical students nation-wide, has profound implications for child health. Pediatricians who graduate from this program serve as the impetus for new solutions to a variety of conditions in developing countries, improving the care of children where it is most needed. Currently, we have 52 residents in this tract, with 11 practicing in rural clinics, and missionary and tertiary care hospitals in the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, India, Israel, Mexico, Papua New Guinea and South Africa. Additionally, a separate program initiated in Laos in 1999 has successfully trained more than 15 Laotian physicians to improve the health of children in a deeply impoverished nation. Center physicians also conduct important re search on malaria and HIV in Kenya, Uganda and Papua New Guinea and on infectious diseases in internationally adopted children here in the United States. |