Terrie Inder, MD
Pediatric Neonatalogist
St. Louis Children’s Hospital
- Discovered that MRI scanning can reveal brain abnormalities in very premature babies born at 30 weeks or less. Alongside colleagues in New Zealand and Australia, Dr. Inder and her team monitored 167 pre-term infants from birth to age two, grading abnormalities. They monitored for a correlation with any severe delays in cognitive and psychomotor development, cerebral palsy, or hearing or visual impairments in the two-year olds.
- As a pediatric neonatalogist in the Division of Newborn Medicine at St. Louis Children’s Hospital, Dr. Inder is also an Associate Professor of Pediatrics, Neurology and Radiology at Washington University School of Medicine.
- Dr. Inder has served in a number of senior research roles at New Zealand institutions, and is also a Clinical Neurological Fellow at Harvard Medical School.
Notable Quotes from Dr. Inder
Dr. Inder on the importance of brain imaging:
“With the MRI, now we can understand what's going wrong in the developing brain when the baby is born early. We can use the MRI when the baby reaches full-term (40 weeks) to predict neurodevelopmental outcomes.”
Dr. Inder discusses the MRI study on premature babies:
“These findings are a breakthrough because previous technology—cranial ultrasounds—do not show abnormalities in infants' brains. We now understand that being born prematurely significantly affects structural brain development, and that has implications for a baby's risk of learning problems.”