General Newsworthy Travels and Meetings

Research Matters

The Paul R. Manske Award for Best Congenital Manuscript is named for my late partner who had such an important impact on the field.  This Award recognizes the most impactful paper related to kids born with hand or arm differences, anomalies, etc.  I am happy to say that our paper was selected for this award by the Pediatric Hand Study Group at the recent annual meeting in Denver:

Bae DS, Canizares MS, Miller PE, Waters PM, Goldfarb CA.  Functional Impact of Congenital Hand Differences: Early Results from the Congenital Upper Limb Differences (CoULD) Registry.  J Hand Surgery, 2018; 43(4):321-330

The paper, Abstract Here, shared the findings from our CoULD Registry regarding function in kids with these birth differences.  Simply put, we found that that these children did have lower upper extremity function scores but had better peer relationships and positive emotional states compared to the normal population.  Really quite amazing findings which are similar to at least one previous report by Ann Nachemson in 2011 which showed positive psychological well being in a smaller but similar group.  I previously blogged about this paper HERE.

This paper is the result of a great deal of hard work from the CoULD Group.  The idea is that we follow children with birth differences or anomalies over time to better understand the effect of time and treatment.  We follow the results of surgery, type of surgery, challenges with surgery, etc but also kids treated with therapy or simple observation.  This group was founded by Don Bae and I to address one of the great challenges in understanding of kids with birth differences- the lack of studies with a sufficient numbers of kids.  So, we began enrolling kids in 2014 and we have added 5 additional sites with a number of other sites set to join.  So far, we have enrolled more than 2,400 children with the 5 most common diagnoses being radial polydactyly, ulnar polydactyly, syndactyly, radioulnar synostosis, and symbrachydactyly.  Most of the 2,400 were malformations of the upper limb or hand plate.  There are now a number of research projects in the works and we are excited to see how these studies will change our understanding of birth anomalies and their effect on children!

Charles A. Goldfarb, MD

My Bio at Washington University
congenitalhand@wudosis.wustl.edu

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