News & Updates

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by and welcome to the Pediatric Seizure Study. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. Later we will conduct a question and answer session. Instructions will be given at that time. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to your host today, Mr. Bob Bock, Press Officer, NICHD.

Very low birth weight infants are significantly more likely to survive when delivered in hospitals with high-level neonatal intensive care units that care for more than 100 such newborns annually than are those delivered in comparable facilities that provide care to fewer than 100 such children every year.

The scenario unfolds almost every day in the United States. A crowd gathers at a playground, or perhaps on a soccer field. A child has fallen to the ground, gripped by a seizure. Usually, the twitching and jerking stop within a few minutes.

Children appear to approach adult levels of performance on many basic cognitive and motor skills by age 11 or 12, according to a new study coordinated by the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

Just in time for Mother's Day, the National Institutes of Health has released ¿Qué Significa ser Padres? (What Does It Mean To Be Parents?), a free Spanish-language publication geared toward Hispanics who are seeking advice on parenting.

The NICHD, the NIH Office of Behavioral and Social Science Research (OBSSR), and the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) within the U.S. Department of Education are hosting a three-day conference about the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study—Birth Cohort (ECLS-B), from May 8-10, 2007.

Researchers funded by the National Institutes of Health have discovered how a defect in a single master gene disrupts the process by which several genes interact to create myelin, a fatty coating that covers nerve cells and increases the speed and reliability of their electrical signals.

The most recent analysis of a long-term NIH-funded study found that children who received higher quality child care before entering kindergarten had better vocabulary scores in the fifth grade than did children who received lower quality care.

Researchers funded by the National Institutes of Health have found that older mothers with normal, full-term pregnancies-particularly first-time older mothers-were more likely to undergo Caesarean delivery than were younger women with similarly low-risk pregnancies.

The National Children's Study has issued a request for proposals to award contracts to up to 20 new study centers. These centers will manage operations in up to a total of 30 communities across the United States.

Researchers funded by the National Institutes of Health have developed an experimental vaccine that reduces stillbirths among rodents born to mothers infected with cytomegalovirus (CMV)--a common virus that can also cause mental retardation and hearing loss in newborn children who were infected in early fetal life.

The largest search for autism genes to date, funded in part by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), has implicated components of the brain's glutamate chemical messenger system and a previously overlooked site on chromosome 11.

Researchers at the National Institutes of Health and other institutions have found a second genetic defect that accounts for previously unexplained forms of osteogenesis imperfecta (OI), a disorder that weakens bones, sometimes results in frequent fractures and is sometimes fatal.

Metformin, a drug used to treat diabetes and thought to hold great promise at overcoming the infertility associated with polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS), is less useful for helping women with the condition achieve pregnancy than is the standard treatment with the infertility drug clomiphene, report researchers in an NIH research network.

When the Institute celebrated the 40th anniversary of its founding in 2003, director Duane Alexander, M.D., initiated the NICHD Hall of Honor as a way to recognize NICHD-supported scientists whose achievements have been especially noteworthy.

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.)

Researchers at the National Institutes of Health have discovered that a previously unexplained fatal form of Osteogenesis Imperfecta-a disorder that weakens bones and which may cause frequent fractures-results from a genetic defect in a protein involved in the production of collagen.

Malaria—a disease caused by a single-celled parasite—can result in severe headache, high fever, chills, and vomiting. Worldwide, an estimated 300 to 500 million clinical cases of malaria occur each year, and the disease kills more than 1 million children annually.

Researchers at the National Institutes of Health have developed an experimental vaccine that could, theoretically, eliminate malaria from entire geographic regions, by eradicating the malaria parasite from an area's mosquitoes.

Using hormonal contraception does not appear to increase women's overall risk of infection with the AIDS virus, report the authors of a large study commissioned by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development of the National Institutes of Health.