Center for
Global Health

Associate Scholar

Languages: English (native), Urdu (proficient), Spanish (moderate proficient)

Bio statement

Madiha Raees, MD joined the Division of Critical Care Medicine at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia as an attending physician and clinical instructor in summer 2021. Outside of her clinical work in the pediatric intensive care unit, she has a deep interest in optimizing healthcare provision for children in variably resourced regions. She is currently studying proposed biomarkers of brain injury in the cerebral malaria population as potential surrogates for advanced imaging and predictors of neurological outcomes. Her work is based in Blantyre, Malawi and she works closely with the Blantyre Malaria Project.

Recent global health projects

1. I am currently examining biomarkers of brain injury in blood samples collected from children upon admission to the hospital with cerebral malaria. I will look at biomarker release patterns and compare them with patterns of brain edema on MRI and neurological outcomes upon discharge and at the 6-month follow-up mark. I hope to see if there are any release patterns that are "predictive" for edema on MRI and/or predictive of outcome.

2. I am in the process of publishing a secondary analysis I completed in my PICU fellowship. I am examining the management and outcomes of children with traumatic brain injury who presented to three centers in sub-Saharan Africa over a 1 month period (referral centers in Addis Ababa, Kigali, and Nairobi). Our conclusions were that management was highly variable and that surgical interventions may be more common when compared with practice patterns in high-income countries. We hope to build on this project to adapt traumatic brain injury guidelines for children from high-income countries for LMICs as has been done with the adult guidelines.

Selected publications

Raees, MQ, Tasker, RC, Watson, RS, Bell, MJ, Clark, RS, Beca, JS, Hutchison, J, Vavilala, MS, Fabio, A, Angus, DC, Kochanek, PM, Fink, EL (2020). Monitoring and Therapeutic Practice Patterns in Pediatric Neurocritical Care. Critical Care Medicine. 48(1):318.
https://journals.lww.com/ccmjournal/Citation/2020/01001/676__MONITORING_AND_THERAPEUTIC_PRACTICE_PATTERNS.639.aspx

Raees, M, Bacha, T, von Saint Andre-von Arnim, A, Kumar, K, Wilson, P, Aklilu, AT, Teklemariam, TL, Hooli, S, Tuyisenge, L, Otupiri, E, Fabio, A, Wang, C, Kochanek, P, Angus, D, Tasker, RC, Fink, EL (2019). A Report on Management of Traumatic Brain Injury in 3 Resource-Limited Settings In Africa. Journal of Neurotrauma. 35(16).

Last Updated: 27 January 2022