News & Updates

In 2020, firearm-related injuries surpassed motor vehicle crashes to become the leading cause of death among children and adolescents in the United States. Dr. Bianchi highlights NICHD-supported research to prevent firearm violence and reduce the related deaths, injuries, and trauma.

Clinical research networks bring together scientists, clinicians, and community stakeholders to identify important clinical questions and design and conduct high-quality studies to answer them. Scientific evidence generated by such studies can impact clinical care, as several recent findings from NICHD’s networks demonstrate.

Read about NICHD’s research findings and activities from 2021.

The newly published 2021 NIH Research Plan on Rehabilitation reflects advances since the previous plan was released in 2016 and new directions that will help guide rehabilitation research across NIH for the next five years.

As we usher in November and Thanksgiving, it’s a fitting time to reflect on NICHD’s commitment to research on nutrition.

A program providing new parents with one to three home visits from a nurse soon after the birth of a child was associated with 39% fewer child protective service investigations for maltreatment through age five, compared to parents who received usual newborn services, according to a study funded by the National Institutes of Health. Families receiving the visits also had 33% fewer emergency department visits.

A federally funded study has verified that a set of measures designed to improve treatment of children in hospital emergency departments helps to reduce the pediatric death rate in these centers. Compared to children treated in emergency departments that scored lowest on implementing the measures, children treated in emergency departments that scored highest were 42% less likely to die. The authors concluded that the findings support emergency departments adopting these standards to improve care for children.

Preliminary data from NICHD-funded researchers provides caregiver-reported information on how children and teens fared during the first months of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The National Institutes of Health has launched a new research effort to understand how SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, affects children, who account for roughly 13% of the total cases of COVID-19 in the United States. The effort is called the Collaboration to Assess Risk and Identify LoNG-term Outcomes for Children with COVID (CARING for Children with COVID).

When dealing with families with limited English language proficiency, pediatric emergency department practitioners were more likely to use professional interpreters for taking medical histories and less likely to use them when administering medication and performing medical procedures, according to a study of 50 cases funded by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD). The study also found that professional interpreters were used for only 36% of communication events with families low in English proficiency.

2020 was a year filled with many challenges. NICHD remained focused on our core mission, advancing key research in women’s health, reproductive science, rare childhood diseases and many more. Watch the video below and review our research highlights of 2020.

Read about NICHD’s research findings and activities from 2020.

Physicians could improve prescribing practices for children with severe neurological impairments by periodically administering parent questionnaires to assess the children’s symptoms, suggests a study funded by the National Institutes of Health. Such routine assessments could help detect adverse effects of drug interactions or cases in which medications have been under or overprescribed.

The National Center for Medical Rehabilitation was established in 1990 through the landmark Americans with Disabilities Act.

Our National Center for Medical Rehabilitation Research has advanced the field with significant achievements over the past 30 years that have improved the health, independence and quality of life of people with disabilities.

NICHD has awarded nearly $2.5 million in grants to support research aimed at improving the understanding and prevention of firearm violence and mortality.

NICHD funded Cohen’s award-winning work on growth factors for most of his career.

NIH invites comments on its Plan of Rehabilitation Research to help update the plan.

Researchers funded by the National Institutes of Health have linked elevated levels of an immune system hormone to the adult cognitive decline that often occurs in people who experienced abuse as children. The hormone, interleukin-6 (IL-6), is involved in the swelling or inflammation produced in response to an injury. The researchers also found that child abuse victims who have a history of depression are more likely to experience cognitive decline as adults.

Video program teaches kids to interpret dogs’ warning signals