Dr Nazima Pathan

Nazima Pathan is Clinical Senior Lecturer in Paediatric Critical Care, and has clinical and research interests in inflammation, sepsis , nutrition and the relationship between gut microbiota and the host in critical illness.

Dr Pathan has a long standing research interest in myocardial dysfunction in septic shock. Her PhD investigated pathophysiology of myocardial dysfunction in meningococcal septicaemia. Using isolated cardiac myocytes as a model of cardiac function, she identified interleukin-6 as a major myocardial depressant factor in children with meningococcal disease. Subsequent work has focused on the downstream pathways activated by IL-6 in cardiac myocytes in order to identify potential therapeutic targets, leading to discovery of a pivotal role of p38MAPK in IL-6-induced cardiac depression.

As part of a study to investigate pathophysiology of gut barrier dysfunction in critical illness, she is undertaking research into the role of gut-derived bacterial endotoxin in the pathophysiology of inflammation and organ dysfunction in children undergoing cardiopulmonary bypass surgery for congenital heart disease, and the potential role of anti-endotoxin therapies in preventing morbidity from cardio-pulmonary bypass in these patients.

She is also investigating the cellular and molecular mechanisms by which glucose control improves inflammatory and metabolic dysfunction in critically ill children, and is undertaking a major study of the genomic and metabonomic responses to critical illness in children.

In collaboration with Professor Elaine Holmes, Professor Gary Frost and Dr Giovanni Montana at Imperial, she is undertaking a major study of the transcriptomic and metabonomic changes occuring in children with congenital heart disease around the time of surgery

Selected Publications