Mounica Y Rao

Texas Children's Hospital · Heart Center

P2X7 purinergic receptor engagement with extracellular ATP induces transmembrane potassium and calcium flux resulting in assembly of the NLRP3 inflammasome in LPS-primed macrophages. The role of potassium and calcium in inflammasome regulation is not well understood, largely due to limitations in existing methods for interrogating potassium in real...

Purpose (1) To characterise changes in dead space fraction during the first 120 post-operative hours in neonates undergoing stage 1 palliation for hypoplastic left heart syndrome, including hybrid procedure; (2) to document whether dead space fraction varied by shunt type (Blalock–Taussig shunt and Sano) and hybrid procedure; and (3) to determine t...

BACKGROUND: Bacillus Calmette-Guerin (BCG) is the recommended therapy for high and intermediate risk non-muscle invasive bladder cancer (NMIBC), but treatment failure is common. While a radical cystectomy is recommended after BCG failure, some patients desire bladder preservation and others are poor surgical candidates. Salvage chemotherapy treatme...

We compared cardiac findings in patients with multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children and Kawasaki disease in the first 6 months of the 2020 coronavirus disease pandemic to patients with Kawasaki disease during 2016-2019. We saw a high rate of coronary aneurysms in 2020, with a similar rate of coronary involvement but greater volume and incid...

This is the first report specifically describing outcomes of pediatric patients who underwent cardiac catheterization while on uninterrupted anticoagulation. One hundred forty-four cardiac catheterizations were identified that met inclusion criteria at our institution from 11/2014-10/2019. The median age and weight of the patients were 6.3 [0.01-20...

Objectives. Adult studies have shown that intravascular ultrasound (IVUS) is safe and efficacious to assess coronary artery anomalies (CAA) in select patients. Experience with IVUS in pediatrics has been reported, but pre- and postoperative data in young CAA patients is lacking. This study describes our population of young patients with anomalous a...

Thirty-three year old G2P1 mother was referred at 28w0d for fetal Ebstein anomaly with: o Circular shunt o Hydrops o Absent end diastolic umbilical artery (UA) and middle cerebral artery flow, and umbilical vein (UV) pulsations • Due to high probability of fetal demise, she was admitted (30w6d) to begin indomethacin therapy (100 mg PO q12H) with da...

Purpose of Review This review discusses the epidemiology of food insecurity (FI) and its consequences in children with congenital heart disease. We aimed to highlight current interventions to screen and address food insecurity in the context of pediatric cardiology and to offer strategies for providers to engage in this meaningful work. Recent Fin...

Introduction: Congenital heart disease (CHD) is associated with significant cardiac anatomic and functional variability. This study tests the implementation and validation of a convolutional neural network algorithm (EchoNet-Dynamic) on a pediatric dataset via a transfer learning approach. We compare the echocardiographic systolic function measure,...

This is the first report specifically describing outcomes of pediatric patients who underwent cardiac catheterization while on uninterrupted anticoagulation. One hundred forty-four cardiac catheterizations were identified that met inclusion criteria at our institution from 11/2014 to 10/2019. The median age and weight of the patients were 6.3 [0.01...

Introduction : Single agent intravesical chemotherapy regimens have historically compared unfavorably to Bacillus Calmette-Guerin (BCG) as initial treatment following resection for patients with high-risk non-muscle invasive bladder cancer (NMIBC). However, there have been few reports of multi-agent intravesical chemotherapy regimens in this settin...

Introduction: Rescue intravesical therapies for BCG failure non-muscle invasive bladder cancer (NMIBC) patients remain a critical focus of ongoing research. Sequential intravesical gemcitabine and docetaxel (Gem/Doce) has shown safety and efficacy in 2 retrospective, single institution cohorts. This doublet has since been adopted as an intravesica...

Background: The objective of this work was to examine current oxygenation index (OI) data and outcomes using electronic medical record data to identify a specific OI value associated with mortality. Methods: This study was a retrospective electronic medical record data review from the pediatric ICU of Phoenix Children's Hospital, with data minin...

The inflammasome is a caspase-1-activating complex that is implicated in a growing number of acute and chronic pathologies. Interest has increased in identifying small molecular inhibitors of inflammasome signaling because of its role in clinically relevant diseases. It was recently reported that the protein tyrosine kinase, Syk, regulates pathogen...