Work Package 4 - Morbidity associated with Congenital Anomalies
Aim
To expand the knowledge on the health and clinical course of children with congenital anomalies up to the first 10 years of life and to evaluate different treatment guidelines in prenatal, neonatal and childhood care in Europe to optimize diagnosis, treatment and health for these children.
Description of Work and Role of Partners
This WP will be led by Dr Ester Garne (RSD) and Dr Maria Loane (UU).
The morbidity of children with specific congenital anomalies will be measured by the number of days spent in hospital, occurance of surgery, days in intensive care units, outpatient contacts and prescriptions of medicine for infections and respiratory illness. The specific tasks are to:
- Evaluate the long term morbidity of children with specific congenital anomalies (RSD).
- Evaluate if morbidity is lower if the congenital anomalies were diagnosed prenatally for selected anomalies (spina bifida, transposition, diaphragmatic hernia, gastroschisis and others) (FIN).
- Evaluate the morbidity of children with specific congenital anomalies with respect to prescription of medications for infections and respiratory illness (UU).
- Evaluate geographic variations in morbidity across Europe for children with congenital anomalies and investigating risk factors and possible explanations for observed health inequalities (UU)
- Evaluate the costs of hospitalisation across Europe during the first 5 years of life for children born with a congenital anomaly (SGUL, UU)
For each task the lead partner (RSD, UU, THL, SGUL) will be responsible for completing literature reviews on the topic, designing study protocols, organising subgroup meetings, receiving data from WP2 Central Results Repository, analysing data and writing final reports/scientific papers.
Each partner/registry is responsible for performing local analyses and aggregating the data, sending the results to the Central Results Repository, and taking part in a discussion of results and commenting on drafts of each paper. Analysis will be done for standard EUROCAT subgroups of specific congenital anomalies (for example spina bifida, Tetralogy of Fallot, esophageal atresia, club foot and many others).
WP4 Team
