Ariel Salas, MD, MSPH, assistant professor in the Department of Pediatrics at UAB, has been awarded a $777,384 grant from The NIH Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development to study protein-enriched human milk diets for extremely preterm infants.

Postnatal growth failure occurs in approximately 60 percent of the nearly 26,000 extremely preterm infants born every year in the United States. Premature infants born at 28 weeks' gestation or less who enroll in the trial will undergo a protein-enriched human milk diet during the first two weeks after birth to see if there is a result in more lean body mass accretion and more diversity of the gut microbiome by the time of hospital discharge.

"Our discoveries could shift current standards of care delivered to premature infants," Salas said.