News & Updates

Dr. Lisa Freund, Ph.D., has been named the new Chief of the Child Development and Behavior Branch, as announced in an email from Dr. Catherine Spong, M.D., Director of the Division of Extramural Research.

Scientists supported by the National Institutes of Health have a new theory as to why a woman’s fertility declines after her mid-30s. They also suggest an approach that might help slow the process, enhancing and prolonging fertility.

Pregnant mothers’ exposure to the flu was associated with a nearly fourfold increased risk that their child would develop bipolar disorder in adulthood, in a study funded by the National Institutes of Health. The findings add to mounting evidence of possible shared underlying causes and illness processes with schizophrenia, which some studies have also linked to prenatal exposure to influenza.

In the April NICHD Research Perspectives, NICHD director Dr. Alan E. Guttmacher talks with researchers about recognizing the forerunners of shaken baby syndrome and other forms of infant abuse, and how episodes of such abuse can be prevented.

For children who have had HIV-1 infection since birth, the combination drug therapies now used to treat HIV appear to protect against the heart damage seen before combination therapies were available, according to researchers in a National Institutes of Health network study.

Pregnant women who experienced financial, emotional or other personal stress in the year before their delivery had an increased chance of having a stillbirth, say researchers who conducted a National Institutes of Health network study.

At 7 months of age, children who are later diagnosed with autism take a split second longer to shift their gaze during a task measuring eye movements and visual attention than do typically developing infants of the same age, according to researchers supported by the National Institutes of Health.

A two-year-old child born with HIV infection and treated with antiretroviral drugs beginning in the first days of life no longer has detectable levels of virus using conventional testing despite not taking HIV medication for 10 months, according to findings presented today at the Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections (CROI) in Atlanta.

Children who failed to acquire a basic math skill in first grade scored far behind their peers by seventh grade on a test of the mathematical abilities needed to function in adult life, according to researchers supported by the National Institutes of Health.

Researchers funded by the National Institutes of Health plan to determine whether elevated blood sugar during pregnancy, a less-severe condition than gestational diabetes, influences later levels of body fat in children and development of diabetes in mothers after giving birth.

Caroline Signore, M.D., M.P.H., has been named Deputy Director of the Division of Extramural Research (DER), a newly created post, which she will assume January 27.

The November 2012 NICHD Director’s podcast is now online. This month’s podcast featured presenters from a recent NICHD Exchange program, “Sleep: the ABC’s of Zs.” The NICHD Exchange is a series of quarterly meetings in which NICHD administrators and scientists present relevant findings designed to spur thought provoking conversations to inform the NICHD research effort.

A more precise method for examining a fetus' genetic material may help detect abnormalities in 40 percent more cases of stillbirth than does the traditional method, according to a National Institutes of Health network study.

​Alan Guttmacher, M.D., Director of the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) announced a number of changes to streamline the institute’s organizational structure and accelerate the exchange of scientific ideas.

​Mice with a condition that serves as a laboratory model for Down syndrome perform better on memory and learning tasks as adults if they were treated before birth with neuroprotective peptides, according to researchers at the National Institutes of Health.

​A combination of anti-HIV drugs has been found to also reduce the risk of recurrent malaria by nearly half among HIV-positive children, according to researchers supported by the National Institutes of Health.

​Roughly 20 percent of youth who have had HIV since birth did not know their HIV status when they first became sexually active, according to a study by a National Institutes of Health-supported research network.

​Women with HIV may benefit from a vaccine for human papillomavirus (HPV), despite having already been exposed to HPV, a study finds. Although many may have been exposed to less serious forms of HPV, more than 45 percent of sexually active young women who have acquired HIV appear never to have been exposed to the most common high-risk forms of HPV, according to the study from a National Institutes of Health research network.

​The October 2012 NICHD Research Perspectives, the NICHD’s monthly podcast, is now online. The podcast features discussions of research of a study on a treatment to reduce the risk of preterm birth and the new Safe to Sleep campaign.

​Preterm births have fallen for the fifth straight year in a row, reported the National Center for Health Statistics of the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, in one of its recent National Vital Statistics Reports. This welcome decline was seen for all groups, and for each stage of pregnancy.