News

This December, the NICHD joins the international community in recognizing the 21st annual AIDS Awareness Month. Research by the NICHD, several partner Institutes at NIH, and other organizations has helped change the outlook for those with HIV/AIDS in the United States and abroad. While it is good to reflect on how far we’ve come, the NICHD keeps its focus on the many challenges that remain for the future.

Women who experience preeclampsia, a serious complication of pregnancy, may have an increased risk for reduced thyroid functioning later in life, report a team of researchers from the National Institutes of Health and other institutions.

Preterm infants born to mothers receiving intravenous magnesium sulfate--a common treatment to delay labor--are less likely to develop cerebral palsy than are preterm infants whose mothers do not receive it, report researchers in a large National Institutes of Health research network.

Each day, approximately 1,000 children—the majority of whom are newborns—become infected with HIV, according to the World Health Organization. HIV can be passed on during pregnancy or delivery, or even after the infant is born, through breastfeeding.

In many poor countries, mothers with HIV face a stark choice: to nurse their infants, and risk passing on HIV through their breast milk--or to formula feed, and deprive their infants of much of the natural immunity needed to protect against fatal diseases of early infancy. Now, two studies supported by the National Institutes of Health offer insights into preventing early death and HIV infection among breastfeeding infants of mothers with HIV in these countries.

NIH Scientists Offer Explanation for Winter Flu Season Stability of Virus' Membrane at Cold Temperatures May Ease Winter Spread.

A woman's response to HIV treatment with drug combinations that contain nevirapine is improved if at least six months have passed after she received the drug as a single dose during labor to prevent passing HIV on to her child. (The response to treatment is measured by the reduction of HIV in the blood.)

The basic research effort to implicate soluble endoglin (sEng) and soluble fms-like tyrosine kinase 1 (sFlt-1) in preeclampsia was led by a coauthor of the current paper, S. Ananth Karumanchi, M.D., a nephrologist at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston.

Newborns whose mothers drank alcohol heavily during pregnancy had damage to the nerves in the arms and legs, according to a study by researchers at the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, one of the National Institutes of Health.

A team of investigators has discovered that preeclampsia--a life threatening complication of pregnancy--results from a failure of the placenta to invade the wall of the uterus and to appropriately mimic the tissue which lines blood vessels. The finding has important implications for the diagnosis and treatment of this sudden, mysterious, and potentially fatal disorder of pregnancy.