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Recovery after encephalitis: a new chance for children

Sophia Children’s Hospital is not only a hospital, but also an academic world where patient care, research, and education come together. A place where children truly come first. Also for meningitis and encephalitis.

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At Sophia Children's Hospital in Rotterdam, most children are treated for autoimmune encephalitis. If recognised in time, these children often make good progress. Unfortunately, not all children recover sufficiently to return to school. Many children have lasting difficulties, for example with concentration, planning, emotional regulation or social interaction. These aspects are sometimes overlooked by clinicians or researchers.

Over the past few years, Juliette Brenner and Maarten Titulaer have developed a score for – and together with – adult patients with autoimmune encephalitis to effectively capture these kinds of difficulties; the PROSE score. The PROSE score is now being used in multiple countries worldwide in research into autoimmune encephalitis.

Now they will adapt the score for children and parents. With the ‘PROSE-P score’, children will gain insight into the problems they are facing, allowing for more targeted rehabilitation and adjustments to be offered. The PROSE-P also makes it possible to test new treatments more quickly and precisely, so that children can benefit from them in the future.

This team of researchers, neurologists and paediatric neurologists from Erasmus MC / Sophia Children's Hospital will develop PROSE-P in the ‘children's brain lab’. Here, the brain functions of children with encephalitis can be extensively studied and compared with healthy children and children with other diseases. This will also be an international collaboration with the children's hospital in Sydney and other children's hospitals in Europe.

ItsME contributes to the funding of scientific research for autoimmune encephalitis in children.