News

Over the past year, NICHD contributed to numerous scientific advances and key initiatives.

In an effort to boost HIV testing, as well as the use of anti-HIV therapy among pregnant women in rural villages, researchers supported in part by NICHD assessed the effectiveness of a church-based screening program in Southern Nigeria.

Dr. Cathy Spong became NICHD’s acting director on October 1, 2015. Here she shares her plans for the year and her thoughts on what makes NICHD so unique.

The National Institutes of Health has announced $46 million in research awards for the Human Placenta Project, an initiative to revolutionize understanding of the placenta. The awards will fund technology development and testing to assess placental function throughout pregnancy, with the ultimate goal of improving pregnancy outcomes and lifelong health.

Extremely preterm infants, those born before the 28th week of pregnancy, are surviving in greater numbers and escaping serious illness, according to a comprehensive review of births in a National Institutes of Health research network.

NICHD recently launched the NICHD Data and Specimen Hub (DASH), a centralized resource for researchers to store and access de-identified data from NICHD-funded research studies for secondary research use.

The placenta is a temporary organ that connects a mother and her fetus. It performs multiple functions, acting as the fetus’s lungs, kidneys, and liver, as well as the gastrointestinal, endocrine, and immune systems. It produces hormones to help maintain pregnancy and support fetal development, and it protects the fetus from the mother’s immune system. There is even a role for the placenta in determining the timing of birth.

A hospital’s neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) provides treatment and care for premature infants and other newborns with severe illnesses, injuries, or conditions. NICUs are specially equipped to address the needs of critically ill infants with medical equipment designed for very small bodies. But often these devices are simply downsized versions of tools created for older patients. There remains a need for new, specially designed tools and devices to better address infants’ unique needs and conditions.

The number of American infants born before the 37th week of pregnancy dropped slightly in 2013, as did the percentage of children with asthma under the age of 17. The percentage of teens who experienced a major depressive episode increased. These and other findings are described in America’s Children: Key National Indicators of Well-Being, 2015.

Ten years ago, NICHD research established the standard therapy for infants born with oxygen deprivation. Today, NICHD research continues to find answers and provide hope for children and families.

National Institutes of Health (NIH) researchers and their colleagues have developed a “placenta-on-a-chip” to study the inner workings of the human placenta and its role in pregnancy.

​The antibiotic meropenem was approved by the U. S. Food and Drug Administration for treating abdominal infections in children less than 3 months of age.

How soon after a baby is born should the practitioner wait to cut the umbilical cord? That simple question has no easy answer.

NICHD conducts and supports research on health issues that are unique to women and on how certain diseases affect men and women differently.

NICHD’s Division of Intramural Research releases its 2014 annual report with progress updates from each program and laboratory.

An intervention to teach mothers of preterm infants how to interact with their babies more effectively results in better weight gain and growth for the infants, according to a study funded in part by the National Institutes of Health.

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.

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.

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.

When researchers triggered an immune response in the wombs of pregnant mice, their offspring showed signs of brain damage that lasted well into adulthood. The animal’s hippocampus—that’s the part of the brain responsible for memory and spatial orientation—was smaller, and they had poor motor skills and behavioral issues, like hyperactivity.