PhD Title: A Longitudinal Observational Assessment of Diastolic Function during the Transitional Period and Infancy using Serial Echocardiography (The DiFuSE Study)

Iyshwarya is a medical graduate of UCC. She is currently a Specialist Registrar in Neonatology with the Royal College of Physicians of Ireland (RCPI), a PhD student at UCC and a Clinical Research Fellow with INFANT. Her areas of interest are neonatal haemodynamics and diastolic cardiac function. DiFuSE will assess diastolic function during the neonatal transitional period and long-term into infancy. This will be a prospective, single-centre, observational study on neonates born at 35 weeks’ gestation or above. The goal is to create reference values for diastolic function parameters and to assess the influence of pre-defined antenatal, intrapartum, maternal, and neonatal factors on cardiac function.

The main questions it aims to answer are:

• What are the normal reference ranges for parameters of diastolic cardiac function in the term neonate using both conventional and novel echocardiographic measures?
• How are these influenced by maternal, intrapartum, and neonatal factors?
• Do the diastolic changes noted during the first two days of life persist into infancy?

Her supervisors are Prof. Eugene Dempsey, Dr Neidin Bussmann and Dr Daragh Finn.