{"id":233551,"date":"2026-03-18T02:25:51","date_gmt":"2026-03-18T07:25:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/03\/infant-heart-surgery-mends-brain-networks-too"},"modified":"2026-03-18T02:25:51","modified_gmt":"2026-03-18T07:25:51","slug":"infant-heart-surgery-mends-brain-networks-too","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/03\/infant-heart-surgery-mends-brain-networks-too","title":{"rendered":"Infant Heart Surgery Mends Brain Networks Too"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/infant-heart-surgery-mends-brain-networks-too.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Infants born with congenital heart disease (CHD) often have neurodevelopmental impairments that affect them later in life, including their ability to regulate their emotions and movements. As CHD is the most prevalent congenital disorder in the United States, researchers are eager to find new ways to treat it.<\/p>\n<p>To better understand how CHD affects an infant\u2019s developing nervous system, researchers at Children\u2019s National Hospital used resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rs-fMRI) to evaluate how healthy infants and those with CHD differed. They recently reported in the Journal of Neuroscience that babies with CHD had altered brain activity in their sensorimotor and limbic networks, but after neonatal heart surgery, these brain networks looked more like those of healthy children.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cUsing fMRI, we can identify brain networks that are vulnerable to altered oxygen and blood flow from congenital heart disease, which could help guide interventions to improve care for children,\u201d said Jung-Hoon Kim, a brain researcher at Children\u2019s National Hospital and a coauthor of the study, in a press release.<\/p>\n<p>In their study, the researchers analyzed rs-fMRI data from 448 neonates. They first analyzed publicly available data from the Developing Human Connectome Project, which contains a large amount infant brain development MRI data.3 They identified 15 different resting state networks, which represented different regions of brain activity, in the healthy neonate brains.<\/p>\n<p>Read More<\/p>\n<hr>\n<p>Babies with congenital heart disease have altered brain activity in regions involved in movement and emotions, but heart surgery restored these brain networks to healthy connectivity.<\/p>\n<div class=\"more-link-wrapper\"> <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/03\/infant-heart-surgery-mends-brain-networks-too\">Continue reading \u201cInfant Heart Surgery Mends Brain Networks Too\u201d | &gt;<\/a><\/div><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Infants born with congenital heart disease (CHD) often have neurodevelopmental impairments that affect them later in life, including their ability to regulate their emotions and movements. As CHD is the most prevalent congenital disorder in the United States, researchers are eager to find new ways to treat it. To better understand how CHD affects an [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":701,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,47],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-233551","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biotech-medical","category-neuroscience"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/233551","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/701"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=233551"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/233551\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=233551"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=233551"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=233551"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}