Arkansas Children's Hospital Research Institute

Patrick Casey, MD

Professor of Pediatrics and of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences/College of Medicine

Phone: (501) 364-1100

Research Overview

Dr. Patrick Casey is the Harvey and Bernice Jones Professor of Developmental Pediatrics. In 1990, Dr. Patrick Casey founded the Center for Applied Research and Evaluation (CARE) in the Department of Pediatrics and served as CARE’s Director until 2006.

He is an active clinician and directs the Growth and Development Program, a multidisciplinary referral clinic for children with failure-to-thrive and developmental problems in infancy/toddler years. In 2006, he initiated a new program called the Medical Home Clinic for Special Needs Children as Co-Medical Director. He is also involved in program development in several key areas, including medical directorship of the KIDS FIRST program, a statewide system of center-based early intervention programs for medically vulnerable children throughout Arkansas.

Some of Dr. Casey’s research interests include the normal growth and development of infants; failure to thrive, food insecurity, and malnutrition in infancy; the effect of the quality of the infants’ home environment on long-term growth, development, and behavior; and the effects of various clinical and nutritional interventions on the growth and development of infants and toddlers. He was the principal investigator of the ACHRI site of the Lower Mississippi Delta Nutrition Intervention Research Initiative for the first 10 years of this program, and he is currently a co-investigator.

Dr. Casey is also an investigator in the United States Department of Agriculture-supported study of the psychological and psychophysiologic consequences of failure to thrive and early malnutrition. This study is attempting to identify infants and toddlers at the time of recognition of failure to thrive/malnutrition and will monitor these children for many years to assess their outcomes.

e was principal investigator of the recently completed 18-year follow-up of the longitudinal study the Infant Health and Development Program, supported by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. This long-term multisite study evaluated the benefits of early developmental intervention with low birth weight preterm infants. Dr. Casey is also the principal investigator of the Arkansas site for the Children’s Sentinel Nutrition Assessment program, supported primarily by the Kellogg Foundation. This long-term study will assess the effects of welfare reform and food insecurity on children’s’ health and nutrition status.

Key Publications

To find publications by Patrick Casey, please visit Pubmed Central, a National Institutes of Health-operated site for electronic distribution of life sciences research reports.