Steven Pavlakis , MD

Currently, he is the director of Pediatric Neurology at SUNY, King’s County and Maimonides Medical Centers and a Professor of Neurology.

Dr Pavlakis has contributed and spear-headed 5 topics in his field making (including multiple other observations), invaluable advancements:

First, he and colleagues coined the term “MELAS” or mitochondrial encephalopathy, lactic acidosis and stroke-like episodes. Here he first described stroke like episodes and was an early expert in describing clinical mitochondrial diseases helping define and distinguish “MELAS, MERRF and Kearns -Sayre.

Second he did the first MRI study in sickle cell disease showing the presence of large vessel strokes as well as “silent infarcts”. Further studies with collaborators found that sickle cell disease is a hypervolemic hyperemic state, which was a compensatory mechanism that sometimes failed to prevent stroke and cognitive decline.  These studies directly led to the use of transcranial doppler to predict stroke as a biomarker for stroke primary prevention.

Third he was a founding member of the International Pediatric Stroke Study (IPSS) started in London England, which is a data set that first enrolled over 3000 stroke children and initially resulted in several NIH grants and over twenty manuscripts.  The IPSS has been important in spearheading research and fellowship programs in pediatric stroke since up until the beginning of the last decade, the field was under recognized and under studied. It was a breakthrough in pediatric stroke research.

Fourth he was the first to use MRI and MRS to determine brain HIV infection in patients with AIDS, defining the basal ganglia as the most vulnerable.

Finally, Dr Pavlakis showed that hypertension negatively affected the pediatric brain, using imaging, TCD and cognitive studies. He with colleagues showed that there is a breakdown in autoregulation in the presence of hypertension; hypertension had been dismissed as a risk factor in pediatrics until these groundbreaking studies.

Education

• Undergraduate: Brown University    
• Medical School: Brown University    
• Internship: Columbia Presbyterian
• Residency: Columbia Presbyterian
• Fellowship: Neurological Institute, Columbia Presbyterian

Research Interests

• Cerebral blood flow genetics

• PubMed