Childhood neuro-disorder centre to come up at AIIMS

NEW DELHI: All India Institute of Medical Science (AIIMS) will soon come up with a centre for advanced research and excellence to cure childhood neuro-developmental disorder by using technology-aided rehabilitation strategies. The centre will come up at the Mother and Child Block of AIIMS.

The advance center will take care of neuro-developmental disorder including neuromotor impairments, motor delay, language delay, cognitive delay, and epilepsy. Along with these, vision and hearing impairments will be covered as co-morbidities.

“The institute has received the Health Ministry’s approval for establishing the Rs 14.3crore centre,” said V Srinivas, Deputy Director, Administration, AIIMS.

The proposal for establishing the centre for excellence was conceptualised by a team of senior faculty led by Prof VK Paul and Prof Sheffali Gulati.

AIIMS’ Acting Director Prof Balram Airan chaired a meeting with senior officials on February 15 to firm up the modalities and project timelines for establishing the centre.

“The state-of-the-art centre will provide high quality affordable care for all sections of the society, perform high end diagnostic and therapeutic research and act as an education and training hub,” Srinivas said.

“The five key elements of the centre of excellence are creation of a National Registry, the National Knowledge and Training Centre, Advanced Diagnostics, Advanced Therapeutics & Rehabilitation and a Helpline for Tele-consultation.”

“The National Registry will be the first of its kind in the country paving the way for meaningful research, policy making and advocacy for childhood neurodevelopment disorders in India,” he said.

A standardised list of investigations for diagnosis of neurodevelopmental disorders would be developed including advanced genetic investigations in collaboration with Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology.