News

A new study has found that extremely overweight or obese children are slower than healthy-weight children to recognize when they have made an error during an ongoing activity, and are slower to correct the error.

Children whose mothers were sensitive to their needs tended to grow up into adults who reached higher levels of academic achievement and to have the most enduring romantic relationships. That’s the conclusion of researchers funded by the National Institutes of Health after analyzing data collected over the course of 30 years.

Working in a physically demanding job, having high blood pressure, and taking multiple medications are among health risks that may undermine a man’s fertility, according to a study by researchers at the National Institutes of Health and Stanford University, Stanford, California.

In 2014, NICHD launched the Human Placenta Project (HPP), a new initiative to revolutionize our understanding of the human placenta and its role in health and disease.

This documentary, developed in collaboration with NIH, highlights the health risks associated with insufficient sleep.

The National Institutes of Health has dedicated $41.5 million for an initiative to understand and monitor the development of the human placenta during pregnancy. The funding will support the development of new technologies to assess the health of the placenta as it grows and matures, with the ultimate goal of improving the health of mothers and children.

About 22% of school-age children speak a language other than English at home, according to the US Census Bureau. The percentage is even higher, 64%, among Hispanic children. Still, it is commonly believed by some that teaching more than one language to children confuses them. Now, new research shows that in fact, bilingualism actually boosts the brain.

Adolescence is a critical period of development that can have lasting effects on physical and emotional health.

Women who deliver a stillbirth—but who have no history of depression—may be at a higher risk for long-lasting depression, conclude researchers funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The depression may last beyond the six months most people require to recover from a major loss and persist for as long as 36 months.

The ATN is a research network devoted to the wellbeing of youth 12 to 24 years old who are HIV-infected or are at risk of infection. The network comprises 14 clinical sites that conduct research and provide adolescents with treatment and support. It is funded by the NICHD, as well as the National Institute on Drug Abuse and the National Institute of Mental Health, two other NIH components.

In the last year, research conducted and supported by the NICHD shed new light on the causes of and potential treatments for a number of birth defects.

NICHD’s Division of Intramural Population Health Research today announced the appointment of Dr. Stephen E. Gilman as the new Acting Chief of the Health Behavior Branch (HBB).

The National Institutes of Health has launched a subsite of DS-Connect: The Down Syndrome Registry for researchers, clinicians, and other professionals with a scientific interest in Down syndrome to access de-identified data from the registry.

The antiretroviral drugs used to keep HIV at bay are an unqualified success at preventing the spread of the virus from mother to child. The drugs are not only essential for maintaining the health of a pregnant woman with HIV, they have also nearly eliminated the transmission of HIV to her baby. Among U.S. women, the likelihood of a mother passing the virus on to her child is now less than 1%.

One of NICHD’s sister Institutes, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) has launched ClinRegs, a public website to help clinical researchers at NIH and in the scientific community at large navigate country-specific, regulatory information as they plan and implement clinical trials.

Nearly 120,000 babies are born with a birth defect* each year in the United States—one baby every 4.5 minutes, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Birth control pills are less effective for obese women. Studies have shown that obesity brings with it hormonal changes that can reduce the pill’s effectiveness.

At first glance, it’s hard to see many similarities among people, mice, and zebrafish. But much of what we know about the earliest stages of human development and birth defects come from studying the development of these animals.

The next NICHD Director’s Lecture at the NIH will feature Diana Bianchi, M.D., from Tufts University School of Medicine. Her talk, titled “Changing Paradigms: From Prenatal Genetic Diagnosis to Fetal Individualized Medicine,” will take place on January 21, 2015, 9:00–10:00 a.m., in Lipsett Amphitheater, at NIH’s Clinical Center in Bethesda, Md.

Researchers from the National Institutes of Health have entered into an agreement with biotechnology company Vtesse, Inc., of Gaithersburg, Maryland, to develop treatments for Niemann-Pick disease type C (NPC) and other lysosomal storage disorders.