Improving the Lives of Kids with Hydrocephalus

Being a new parent is tough enough but imagine being told that your baby has an abnormal build-up of fluid around the brain (hydrocephalus) and that it’s going to require neurosurgery.

There is still no way of telling when life-threatening fluid build-up is causing a rise in brain pressure except for a brain scan in hospital. Treatment is available but with a 60% chance it will block and fail within the first 2 years.

Our goal is to improve the lives of children and adults with hydrocephalus. We are developing a tool for parents and caregivers which will allow them to monitor the pressure in the brain remotely via a sensor placed alongside the drainage tube, that can then be easily shared with health care professionals electronically.

It will reduce hospitalisations, radiation exposure from CT scans and the anxiety of parents around the care of their children.

Cure Kids is kindly supporting our research at the Auckland Bioengineering Institute and we questioned how we could “give back”. In a mad rush of blood to the head four of our research team decided to cycle the length of Aotearoa (that’s 3000 km) starting February 2022. We hope you will come on this journey with us and support Cure Kids.

For those that want to follow along, we will update our facebook page as we prepare and do the ride: https://www.facebook.com/RidingForCureKids/

Thanks;

David Budgett, Bryon Wright, Daniel McCormick and Simon Malpas

(and friends: David Vallance, John Davies, Nigel Garland, Isaac Wilkinson, Steve Broderick)