Karolinska Institutet (KI)
Dept of Pediatrics
B57, Karolinska Huddinge
SE-14186 Stockholm

Sweden

 www.ki.se

Participant's Lead

Prof. Mats Blennow Senior lecturer; President of the European Society of Neonatology  Phone: +46 7048 46269  Fax: +46 8585 87575  Contact

Project Staff

Dr. Boubou Hallberg Clinical lead KI  Phone: +46 70 4845 943  Contact

Dr. Katarina Robertson Grossmann PhD student  Phone: +46 70 7250 148  Contact

Mrs. Ingela Edqvist Research nurse  Phone: +46 7362 51874  Contact

Institute Presentation

Karolinska Institutet is one of Europe's largest medical universities. It is also Sweden's largest centre for medical training and research. The Nobel Prize has been handed out since 1901, and the laureate in Physiology or Medicine is nominated by the Nobel Assembly at the Karolinska Institutet. 600 research groups span the full spectrum of medical disciplines. Each year, researchers at Karolinska Institute publish approximately 4,000 articles in international scientific journals. Karolinska Institutet's publications from 2006 were cited 41 per cent more often than the global average.
The department of neonatology at the Karolinska University Hospital, Stockholm is the largest tertiary care NICU in Sweden. The department is responsible for neonatal intensive care for the greater Stockholm region with a total annual birth rate of 28,000 infants / year, and is responsible for NICUs at three of the Stockholm hospitals.

Neonatal neurology is one main research area in the department. Research includes experimental studies on brain development, respiratory control and brain damage, clinical trials on both normal brain development, emergence of consciousness, pain and brain damage. The department has a long tradition in delivering courses of excellence, both national and international. The clinical neonatal neurological research is organised in a special group- the Neonatal Brain Imaging Group (NeoBIG) consisting of neonatologists, developmental pediatricians, neuroradiologists, MR-physicists and neurophysiologists. Several papers in high impact journals have been published over the last few years, and the group has been successful in its fundraisings. Three of the main researchers (H Lagercrantz, U Ådén and M Blennow) are members of the European Neonatal Brain Club.
The main research topics are: perinatal asphyxia, brain damages in extremely preterm infants, functional imaging of the newborn brain using near infra red spectroscopy in development and disease, experimental brain damages in ELGA-infants, and the emergence of consciousness.