Our latest paper is out this month in Frontiers in Pediatrics. The paper is a thought piece that considers the disease necrotizing enterocolitis (NEC). NEC is a devastating disease of the intestine that mainly affects premature infants. For reasons that remain unknown, some premature infants will suddenly develop bowel injury that can cause death or signifcant loss of intestine. This doesn't usually happen right after birth, which makes it especially cruel. Just as parents are starting to let down their guard a little about their fragile baby - NEC sneaks in like a thief in the night. We think this lead time may be critical to why NEC develops. In our lab, we are thinking about how things that the baby is exposed to after birth may modulate the intestine over time. This modulation may then leave the gut susceptible to a second injury that causes the acute disease of NEC. If this is true, then understanding these changes could help us to correct them and would lead to new therapies that could prevent NEC. We have started some exciting work on this theory and have some interesting data to support our hypothesis - more to come in the next year!
Figure: Our "two-hit" NEC hypothesis.
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