Stephen Hsu:

It's my pleasure to introduce Nigel Paneth, MD, MPH. He is a pediatrician and epidemiologist. He joined Michigan State in 1989 and founded what is now the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics in the College of Human Medicine. A Harvard-educated physician, he completed his postgraduate training in pediatrics at the Bronx Municipal Hospital, Albert Einstein College of Medicine, and later attended Columbia to earn his Master's degree in Public Health.

Over his career, Dr. Paneth has held uninterrupted National Institutes of Health funding and has been a leader of three of the largest NIH-supported longitudinal studies investigating the determinants of intellectual and neurodevelopmental disabilities in premature infants. He is currently the lead principal investigator of the Michigan Center of the NIH Environmental Influences on Child Health Outcomes or ECHO study.

He has authored or edited four books and published almost 300 peer-reviewed papers. He currently serves on a number of state, national, and international boards or committees, including serving as Co-Chair of the Michigan PFAS and Health Research Consortium. By researching the origins of brain damage and developmental disabilities focusing, especially on pregnancy and the period surrounding birth, Nigel works to develop approaches to prevent these disorders.

In 2014, Nigel joined Michael Leahy as Co-Director of MSU's Center for Research in Autism, Intellectual and other Neurodevelopmental Disabilities, or as our tradition here, we have to make an acronym out of everything, C-RAIND, which he will tell us more about today. Please welcome University Distinguished Professor, Dr. Nigel Paneth.

Nigel Paneth:

Well, thank you, Steve, for that very generous introduction, almost not prepared for that. And, President Stanley, and Provost Sullivan, honorable trustees, I'm really happy that you invited us to tell you a little bit about our program in the Center for Research in Autism, Intellectual and other Neurodevelopmental Disabilities, which began on campus in 2013 under the leadership of Mike Leahy, who is a bit hoarse today, so I'm the designated hitter for telling you all about C-RAIND. And, then I joined in 2014 to give another perspective, a more prevention-oriented perspective to our program.

Nigel Paneth:

So, before I tell you about what we do in C-RAIND, I'd like to set out the landscape of neurodevelopmental disabilities, the things we are dealing with, and I'll start with the Totals column. 1 in 5 to 1 in 6 children, and perhaps also adults, suffer from a developmental disability. This not a rare phenomenon.

Nigel Paneth:

The more severe and uncommon ones include cerebral palsy, which occurs in 1 in 300 children. Epilepsy, you may be surprised to hear has a cumulative prevalence of 1% in the population by age 20. Severe intellectual disability, 1 in 300 children, also. Mild intellectual disabilities, by which we mean children with IQ scores of between 50 and 70, are found in about 1 to 1.5% of the child population now. And, autism spectrum disorder is now diagnosed in-between 1 and 1.5% of U.S. children.

Nigel Paneth:

Then we turned to the even commoner disabilities. Learning disabilities are found in about 1 in 10 school children, and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder in at least 5%. So, the total allowing for overlap among disabilities is between 1 in 5 and 1 in 6 citizens affected. So, this is not a small problem, and I'm sure all of you have encountered in your families and among your associates, people with these difficulties, and families with these difficulties.

Nigel Paneth:

Now, what do we do? We work on prevention, especially looking at environmental influences, phenomena, infections, other things that contribute to developmental disabilities. We work on the diagnosis and assessment of developmental disabilities with a particular focus on making early diagnosis, so that interventions can be applied more effectively.

Nigel Paneth:

We are very involved in lifespan transitions. We don't think of these developmental disabilities as solely affecting small children. We recognize four transitions: conception to toddlerhood; toddlerhood to the school, that's a very big transition for so many parents; from school to the workplace; and then the problem, which is accelerated in many types of developmental disabilities of aging. And, when I speak about transition to the workforce, I should note that the Rehabilitation Counseling program that Mike Leahy has directed now for many years has been rated the #1 program in that field in the United States over the past 20 years. Tremendous accomplishments.

Nigel Paneth:

Then we turn to interventions. We want to make life better for people with developmental disabilities. And, we have many programs that I'll tell you about that involve interventions. And then, implementation. We have a successful intervention, but we're academics, we sit here in the University. Just because we've published our trial, work doesn't end there. We've got to make sure it gets used, it gets implemented in communities that need it.

Nigel Paneth:

Our vision is to make MSU a global leader in research, in training, and in service in the neurodevelopmental disabilities. And, we have a Value Statement that support our vision and shape our culture: respecting human dignity, that's particularly important in people with developmental disabilities; engaging with the community; and we have a community advisory group that we work with including diverse populations; making sure that we have a solid scholarly environment to study the developmental disabilities; and always using the best available evidence before we move into practice.

Nigel Paneth:

Now, we have, we're a virtual center. We have no specific location, we're all around campus, we have 93 faculty on our website from 12 colleges, who actively contribute to this effort from all across, and then, in addition, extension, outreach, and engagement. Among our achievements in the last few years, in research, we have a program that seed funds grants to assist investigators to get larger external funding.

Nigel Paneth:

And, just only two examples of this are the ECHO program that was referenced by Steve, a seven-year, $17 million NIH program that focuses on the environmental causes of childhood disorders, and in our case, especially focusing on neurodevelopmental disorders. Connie Sung in the School of Education has a Department of Defense grant on autism, working on school to work issues, that's over $1 million. But, those are only two examples of the grants we've been able to acquire by [inaudible 00:07:10] to bring together investigators from so many different disciplines.

Nigel Paneth:

We have several training program. The Hegarty Fellows training program is a postdoctoral program in which the postdoctoral fellows spend one year here at MSU and one year in Ireland with our collaborators in Irish universities. And, more recently, we were successful in obtaining an assisted fellowship that's funded by the European Union. Those grants, about 2% of the applications get funded. This is to provide training in technology for disabilities, new technologies that might assist people in communication and other aspects of disability.

Nigel Paneth:

And, MSU has established with support of our program, a Master's degree in Applied Behavioral Analysis, which is the preferred technique for helping children and adults with autism. We now have substantially contributed to the workforce of people who are qualified, ABA therapists and trainers in the State of Michigan.

Nigel Paneth:

We have Spartan Project SEARCH. It supports the employment of young adults with neurodevelopmental disabilities. And, I'm happy to say that our employment rate for people who have gone through this program is much, much higher than the employment rate for disabled children. In general, in Michigan, we have our Celebrating the Spectrum festival with the College of Music. I'm happy that Deborah Moriarty is here. She plays a huge role in this. It showcases the musical talent of precollege students on the spectrum. I can't tell you how moving it is to see this program in action. I invite all of you to come and visit our summer program when it takes place.

Nigel Paneth:

We are collaborating with Hope Network in developing new assessment programs for autism spectrum disorder, and we will be opening new space jointly with them on Hagadorn Road, right off campus on April the 27th, between 3:00 and 5:00 p.m. You're all invited to that as well.

Nigel Paneth:

A new initiative we just, on January 15th, submitted jointly with Wayne State University, an application to get an NIH-supported Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities Research Center in Michigan. This is one of the oldest, it perhaps is the very oldest research center program at NIH. It was funded by the Kennedy family in the early 1960s, who have always had a special interest in developmental disabilities.

Nigel Paneth:

There are 14 centers, nationally, Michigan has never had one. This would be the first one in Michigan. Awards will be announced in May. We keep our fingers crossed. If we got this, we'd get five years of support to the two universities totaling $6.5 million, 2/3 of the budget is ours. Our lead study in this center is a study of whether computer games, which actually are being pioneered as tools for intellectual development in childhood in Africa, can improve cognitive outcomes in lead-exposed children in Flint, Michigan.

Nigel Paneth:

And, this study is led by Mike Boivin of the College of Osteopathic Medicine, and someone I'm sure you all know about our wonderful, Mona Hanna-Attisha who's my colleague in the Department of Pediatrics and Human Development, located in Flint in our College of Human Medicine. We will also provide resources for not just studying, but for implementing evidence-based interventions for disabilities in the community, and we'll provide two special resources for investigators, if we're funded.

Nigel Paneth:

One is a core that supports the assessment of environmental contaminants and their role in intellectual and developmental disabilities. And, the other is a subset of that core deals with the microbiome, an increasingly attended to factor in developmental disabilities. And also, we will provide support to all investigators in this topic in every aspect of assembling studies of IDD from recruiting participants, to doing assessments, to completing the statistical analysis.

Nigel Paneth:

So, our ultimate goal, as I said before, make MSU a global leader and a major resource for cutting-edge research and programs and treatments for assessing the problems of children with any of the intellectual and developmental disabilities, autism spectrum disorders, other forms of intellectual disability, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, learning disabilities, and the other neurodevelopmental disabilities, such as cerebral palsy and epilepsy.

Nigel Paneth:

Thank you very much for listening. And, I hope I can answer questions or some of my colleagues can answer questions if you have them. Thanks very much.

President Stanley:

Questions. So, I'll just make a comment. I think, thank you, first of all for that presentation, and the work is extraordinary. And, I think this is, we had Founder's Day on the 12th, obviously, 165th anniversary of Michigan State University. And, I think if the founders considered what their concept was, and particularly as we think about Michigan State University in the context of the land-grant university, which takes the knowledge we generate here and applies it out, I think the kind of multidisciplinary approach you're taking, which takes full advantage of all the different departments we have at the University, your outreach into the community, and yet the high quality of science you're putting forward as well, epitomizes I think, what we would like to see from MSU.

President Stanley:

So, thank you for that presentation, which I found inspiring, and I look forward, and wish you luck on the grant, and look forward to continue to have this conversation about the impact you're having.

Nigel Paneth:

And, if I can make it a little end joke. That's why I'm not at Harvard, why I'm here at MSU. This is where we do that kind of work.

President Stanley:

Yeah, I left Harvard too. So, yeah. So, yeah. So, right, thank you. Other comments or questions.

Trustee Byrum:

I just want to say thank you for the presentation. I ran into Ian Gray at Christmastime-

Nigel Paneth:

There's Ian right there.

Trustee Byrum:

Buying Spartan gear for grandchildren, and we got to talking about the autism program and how great it would be to have you come forward and present at one of our board meetings. So, thank you very much. I'm very grateful that, that did occur, and you're doing great work in it. And, for parents that are dealing with children with disabilities, you are making a difference in their lives. So, this, I couldn't agree more with President Stanley's comments. But, thank you for your presentation. It's very inspiring.

President Stanley:

Thank you.