News & Updates

Groups of immigrant mothers from Japan and South America knew less about child development than did their European American counterparts, according to a study by researchers at the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development of the National Institutes of Health.

Pregnant women who are overweight or obese progress through labor more slowly than do normal weight women, according to a study by researchers at the University of North Carolina and the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development of the National Institutes of Health.

Infants who cry persistently in an uncontrollable manner without any obvious cause after 12 weeks of age may be at risk for lower IQ scores and poorer fine motor skills by the time they reach 5 years of age, according to researchers from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development of the National Institutes of Health.

A new study suggests that the conventional hormone therapies used to treat fibroid tumors are unlikely to produce much improvement and at best will only temporarily relieve symptoms. However, the study findings also suggest a strategy for developing a new, non-surgical treatment.

From language to literature, from music to mathematics, a single protein appears central to the formation of the long-term memories needed to learn these and all other disciplines, according to a team of researchers led by scientists at the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development of the National Institutes of Health.

The Back to Sleep campaign marks its tenth anniversary this October with renewed efforts to reduce the risk of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS) in the African American community by reminding parents and caregivers to always place infants on their backs to sleep.

Children who have problems breathing during sleep tend to score lower on tests of mental development and intelligence than do other children their age, according to two studies funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

An NIH roadmap initiative will provide a total of nearly $8 million in funding to seven institutions that can train researchers in multidisciplinary research-research involving teams of specialists from a variety of disciplines.

Regardless of the language they are learning to speak, young children learn vocabulary in fundamentally the same way, according to a study by researchers at the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development of the National Institutes of Health.

The injectable contraceptive depot-medroxyprogesterone acetate (DMPA) appears to increase a woman's risk of acquiring the sexually transmitted infections chlamydia and gonorrhea by approximately three fold when compared to women not using a hormonal contraceptive, according to a study jointly funded by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) at the National Institutes of Health and the U.S. Agency for International Development's Office of Population and Reproductive Health.

The pineal gland-which regulates the cycles of sleep and waking--appears to have evolved as an indirect way to improve vision, by keeping toxic compounds away from the eye, according to a new theory by a researcher at the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development at the National Institutes of Health.

The well-being of America's children has shown strong gains in some areas but has declined in others, according to a yearly report by federal agencies compiling statistics on children.

A single dose of the drug nevirapine given at the beginning of labor, when combined with a short course of the anti-HIV drug AZT (zidovudine), dramatically reduces a woman's chances of passing HIV on to her child, according to a study of Thai women funded in part by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development of the National Institutes of Health.

High school graduates from immigrant families are as likely to go on to college and to perform as well academically as their peers from American-born families, according to a study funded in part by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), one of the National Institutes of Health.

Multivitamin supplements containing high doses of the vitamin B complex, as well as vitamins C and E, given to HIV-infected women during pregnancy and for more than 5 years after they gave birth reduced the symptoms of AIDS, according to a study of Tanzanian women supported by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) and the John E. Fogarty International Center (FIC) for Advanced Study in the Health Sciences, both of the National Institutes of Health.

After four weeks of age, infants who breast feed from mothers infected with HIV continue to be at risk for infection with HIV for as long as they breastfeed, according to an analysis conducted and funded by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development of the National Institutes of Health.

The results of an international survey show that young adolescents in the United States are no more likely to engage in violent behavior than are youth in 4 other countries.

Fibroid tumors-the sometimes painful uterine growths affecting many American women-lack a key protein that plays a role in holding tissues together, according to a study by researchers from the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences (USUHS) and the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development of the National Institutes of Health.

Some of the genes that allow nerve cells and some other types of cells to send elaborate chemical messages to each other appear to have been transferred to animals or their immediate ancestors from bacteria eons ago, according to a study by researchers from the National Library of Medicine and the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, both part of the National Institutes of Health.

A team of U.S. and Irish researchers has come one step closer to understanding why a high proportion of the population is genetically at risk for neural tube defects, according to a genetic study by researchers in Ireland and at two of the National Institutes of Health, the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, and the National Human Genome Research Institute.