Our Work
Current & Past Work
Describing Growth in Young Children with Cleft
The BLOOM study was born from our work describing the patterns of growth in US infants with cleft in the first 36-months of life.
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Our first study examined how children with a cleft grow in the first 6-months of life. This manuscript can be found here.
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Our second study tracked growth from birth to 36-months among children with cleft seen at Seattle Children's Hospital. This manuscript can be found here.
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iCOO: Infants with Orofacial Clefts: Development and Validation of an Observer-Reported Outcomes Instrument
Infants with a cleft lip with or without cleft palate can experience challenges with feeding, vocalizing, sleeping, hearing, breathing, and being active. Until the iCOO, there was no standardized way to identify these challenges. The iCOO is a questionnaire used by caregivers to provide information about their child's health and well-being based on their observations. The iCOO will be used in the BLOOM study to help us understand infant health and well-being.
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The Nifty Cup
Safe feeding of infants unable to breastfeed such as infants with orofacial cleft in low-resource settings can be a challenge due to poor water quality and lack of refrigeration. The World Health Organization recommends that infants unable to breastfeed be cup feed. No cup specifically designed for infants in low-resource setting existed until we developed the Nifty Cup to address this gap. The Nifty Cup has been commercialized for use in low-resource settings by Laerdal Global Health. See the Nifty Cup in action here.
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