At the last Trustees Meeting we decided that we should spend £50,000 to get two important scoliosis research projects up and running – one concerning the traumatic insult to the body when undergoing complex spinal surgery and the other concerning the relationship of scoliosis in children with congenital heart disease. This would form the basis of a Briefing Lunch and other publicity so as to raise the profile of the Yorkshire Children’s Spine Foundation as an important grant giving body which in turn would hopefully increase donations to our charity. The following are summaries of these projects. 1 A prospective clinical and scientific study to quantify the burden of scoliosis surgery Although the past 20 years has seen progressive improvement in the safety of scoliosis surgery, morbidity including infection and paralysis although uncommon can be devastating. Nowadays with more complex instrumentation systems implanted to correct spinal deformity, surgery takes longer and often has to be from the front and back (i.e. through the chest or abdomen in a first stage and then from the back in a second stage). Sometimes these stages are combined (after the first stage from the front the patient is turned over and the posterior operation carried out immediately thereafter) giving a total anaesthetic and operating time of, say, 10 to 12 hours. Although these children and teenagers are otherwise very healthy, complications can and do occur and it behoves us to minimise these as far as possible. A lot of our knowledge about how the body reacts to trauma comes from studying severely injured patients in intensive care units. Traumatic injury influences body metabolism and immunological and inflammatory changes can be measured using specific blood markers. Recent advances in molecular medicine have allowed the measurement of these pro-inflammatory cascades following trauma and during surgery highlighting the importance of inflammatory mediators in the response to injury. Professor