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Kawasaki |
About $9,000 was raised for Kawasaki research at the Samuel S. Modica Memorial Walk/Run for Research, held May 19 on a 2.7-mile course starting at Meadowhill South Park in Northbrook, Ill.
Samuel was a 10-year-old Northbrook boy who died suddenly of Kawasaki disease Feb. 13, 1994. He would have been a sixth grader at Northbrook Junior High School at the time of the fund-raiser.
The money went into a Kawasaki research fund at Children's Memorial Hospital in Chicago. The planners of the event also hoped to help alert parents and physicians in the community to the early warning signs of the disease. Dr. Stanford Shulman, who heads the hospital's infectious disease division, attended the walk to answer parents' questions.
Some seed money was saved to help underwrite the second annual event next year.
Lucile Salter Packard Children's Hospital in Palo Alto, Calif., recently became one of many pediatric medical centers to launch a cardiopulmonary exercise testing program designed for kids.
The program was developed to help prevent coronary and lung disease in adults through proper screening as children. Prime candidates for exercise testing include children with known or suspected cardiac disease, like Kawasaki.
It's also used for children who have exercise symptoms like chest pain, shortness of breath or high blood pressure. And it can be used to detect and manage exercise-induced asthma, assess physical fitness in overweight children, assess exercise tolerance in patients with chronic lung disease and measure the effects of chemotherapy drugs on the heart.
Glenn Hodge, a spokesman for the project, said the hospital uses a bicycle ergometer (stationary bike) and a treadmill for the stress tests. Children wear a mask to measure gas composition while they breathe and 12 electrocardiogram leads. Their pulse also is monitored and their blood pressure tested.
Hodge estimated that more than half the children's hospitals in the country have a similar program, adding that pediatric stress testing may become more standardized in the next five to 10 years.
The Kawasaki Families' Network has become a constituent organization under the National Organization for Rare Disorders, which manages data bases on rare diseases out of its headquarters in New Fairfield, Conn. The network will be listed in the NORD newsletter.
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