News & Events

Mental health
A study by medical researchers from the Sydney Children’s Hospitals Network (SCHN) and UNSW Sydney has shown that young children with heart disease and their families may have poorer quality of life than the general population, leading to calls for routine screening to enable early intervention and better outcomes. The paper – the largest Australian study on the quality of life in young childr...
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Hearts and Minds
Congratulations to Associate Professor Nadine Kasparian, who has won the prestigious Harkness Fellowship in Health Care Policy and Practice for 2018-2019, allowing her to spend a year at Harvard Medical School and Boston Children's Hospital working with the world’s top health policy experts. The Fellowship will allow A/Prof Kasparian to extend her medical psychology program...
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Heart Research
Researchers from the Sydney Children’s Hospitals Network have been awarded two HeartKids project grants to support research into improving health outcomes for children undergoing major cardiac surgery. The HeartKids Grants-in-Aid Program awarded $273,000 across a total of seven projects, enabling vital research into childhood and congenital heart disease across Australia. Associate Professo...
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Research
Improving patient outcomes through innovative solutions is crucial to advancing translational medical research, where multidisciplinary collaboration can provide the key to advancing new discoveries.  A workshop hosted by the Westmead Institute for Medical Research earlier this week saw “rapid-fire” talks from clinicians, engineers and biomedical scientists to spark discussions between th...
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Publications
A review of past qualitative studies involving children with congenital heart disease (CHD) has identified key experiences that affect their daily lives.  This systematic review, published in the European Journal of Paediatrics last week, was undertaken by our researchers at the Heart Centre for Children and the Centre for Kidney Research, both groups at Kids Research, together with collabor...
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  • 14 August 2017
A simple dietary supplement could prevent hundreds of babies from being miscarried or being born with birth defects, a world-first study has found. The ground-breaking research, which was conducted at the Victor Chang Cardiac Research Institute and led by Professor Sally Dunwoodie, has not only identified that a deficiency in a vital molecule, known as NAD, is a major cause of miscarriages and...
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  • 09 December 2016
The innovative Hearts and Minds program at The Heart Centre for Children is currently leading the world.  A/Prof Nadine Kasparian, who runs the Psychology Research Program and Clinical Service, has been awarded a prestigious National Heart Foundation Future Leader Fellowship. The Hearts and Mind Program combines psychology research with clinical care to improve the health and wellbeing of...
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  • 17 June 2015
Theodore was diagnosed in the womb during a routine ultrasound with a very serious condition, hypoplastic left heart syndrome. The left side of his heart did not develop. If not for the advances in medical research over the last twenty years, Theodore would have died. Knowing his condition in advance meant that his delivery was planned for nearby Westmead Hospital and he was  rushed...
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Nikita's Story
Nikita first came to The Heart Centre for Children because she had a hole in the top two chambers of her heart, known as an atrial septal defect (ASD). She is not the only person in the family to have a heart condition – her mother, grandfather and younger sister also have ASDs. Nikita’s mum, Danielle, had surgery to close her ASD when she was 20 years old and Nikita’s grandfather had his surg...
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