# Noninvasive markers of functional nausea in children

> **NIH NIH R01** · VANDERBILT UNIVERSITY MEDICAL CENTER · 2020 · $312,787

## Abstract

Project Summary
The gastric electrical slow wave mediates neuromuscular interactions in the gastrointestinal syncytium that
determine the functional status of peristalsis and digestion. Millions of patients present to gastroenterologists
each year with functional GI disorders which are associated with gastric slow wave dysrhythmia. However,
noninvasive methods for assessing this activity quantitatively remain elusive. Structural imaging provided by
CT and ultrasound can be useful when functional disorders are associated with anatomical changes, but
frequently, gastric disorders occur with no concomitant structural abnormality. Functional nausea (FN) is a GI
disorder that affects millions of Americans, particularly adolescents, but diagnoses remain largely exclusionary
relying on symptomology with an otherwise normal diagnostic workup. FN is important to study in adolescents
because it is ubiquitous, chronic, tracks into adulthood and adversely affects the quality of life in patients, yet
understanding the pathophysiology might allow interventions at a time of therapeutic plasticity. The ability to
study FN is limited by the lack of an objective clinical test to characterize or measure nausea or to predict its
response to treatment or exacerbating factors. Electrogastrography (EGG) is as a possible approach, but signal
quality and limitations of volume conduction in the abdomen have previously limited its utility to the
characterization of temporal dynamics. Our preliminary data show that blind source separation applied to the
multichannel electrogastrogram (EGG) can characterize propagation of the gastric slow wave, and that the
magnetogastrogram (MGG), which measures spatiotemporal properties of magnetic fields from the gastric
slow wave, also allows characterization of the propagation of the gastric slow wave in addition to evaluation of
its frequency and power distribution. Furthermore, these spatiotemporal characteristics change during
hyperglycemia and functional disorders like gastroparesis. We propose to study how functional nausea in
adolescents may be characterized noninvasively by the use of multichannel EGG and MGG recordings. Our
main aims in this proposal are to develop a mathematical model of FN, correlate functional differences in slow
waves with nausea in patients with FN using modeling and experimental approaches, and to characterize
biophysical, clinical and psychosocial phenotypes of FN using EGG/MGG. We will investigate differences
between standard four-channel EGG and multichannel EGG/MGG, assess changes in slow wave rhythm and
propagation pattern from EGG and MGG with disease in FN patients, examine differences between EGG and
MGG signatures of severe nausea in FN patients, and will determine how MGG/EGG slow wave rhythm and
pattern abnormalities relate to psychological functioning and pharmacological intervention. The analysis of
slow wave activity represents the first physiologically-quantifiable noninvasive assessment met...

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 9977005
- **Project number:** 5R01HD088662-04
- **Recipient organization:** VANDERBILT UNIVERSITY MEDICAL CENTER
- **Principal Investigator:** LEONARD A BRADSHAW
- **Activity code:** R01 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2020
- **Award amount:** $312,787
- **Award type:** 5
- **Project period:** 2017-08-10 → 2022-07-31

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/9977005

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 9977005, Noninvasive markers of functional nausea in children (5R01HD088662-04). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-22 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/9977005. Licensed CC0.

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