Last summer, Dr. Hill was published in Global Pediatric Health for the project, “The Gastrointestinal and Gastroesophageal Reflux (GIGER) Scale for Infants and Toddlers," where she and her team explored the gastrointestinal and gastroesophageal reflux (GER) symptoms observable by parents of infants and toddlers to develop a clinical assessment tool called the Gastrointestinal and Gastroesophageal Reflux (GIGER) Scale. The purpose of this tool is to provide guidance for decision-making and personalized care interventions for infants and toddlers with GI symptoms that may warrant further intervention. This GIGER scale showed significant upper and lower GI symptom improvement in babies with tongue-tie after correction of the anomaly. These findings generated ideas for the current microbiome study Dr. Hill is leading.

In 2020, Dr. Hill was awarded a School of Nursing Seed Grant which she went on to publish. "A pilot study of non-nutritive suck measures immediately pre-and post-frenotomy in full term infants with problematic feeding," was published in the Journal of Neonatal Nursing. This work was an important interdisciplinary collaboration between nurse researchers, dentists, and speech language pathologists.

“The data collected from the Seed Grant project is an important first step to understanding the physiologic implications of this oral anomaly,” Dr. Hill explained. She was awarded a second seed grant last year for her project, "Exploring gastrointestinal symptoms and the gut microbiome of infants with tongue-tie." She is applying for a foundation grant to take this work to the next level to examine nutritive sucking in the setting of tongue-tie and post-correction via frenotomy.

Dr. Hill's recent work has been published in Nursing for Women’s Health, and her dissertation work that explored the relationship between maternal breastfeeding symptoms and infant feeding problems in the setting of tongue-tie was published in Global Pediatric Health (GPH) last month. Both publications involved IHP Master of Science students she mentored through their scholarly project course.

Looking forward, Dr. Hill hopes to secure extramural grant funding for larger-scale studies. “Specifically, I hope to create a large-scale study that will aid in the development of an assessment tool for the mother-infant dyad to inform clinical practice guidelines that are currently sorely lacking," she said. 

Dr. Hill is collaborating with other researchers to study the infant gut microbiome, based on the findings from development of the GIGER tool and early research using that assessment measure. 

“It’s all very exciting – there is so much work to do, but I am committed to improving the care of babies with tongue-tie and their families.”