News & Updates

More than 40 percent of infants in a group who died of sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS) were found to have an abnormality in a key part of the brain, researchers report. The abnormality affects the hippocampus, a brain area that influences such functions as breathing, heart rate, and body temperature, via its neurological connections to the brainstem. According to the researchers, supported by the National Institutes of Health, the abnormality was present more often in infants who died of SIDS than in infants whose deaths could be attributed to known causes.

TBIs and concussions get a lot of attention in the news. In football players at all levels, repeated concussions have been linked to long-term health problems. Veterans have come back from wars with brain injuries caused by explosions. TBIs also happen in daily life. Children fall on the playground, and elderly people have balance problems that lead to more falls. As common as TBIs are, though, there is still much to learn about how to treat these injuries and how to deal with related problems over the long term.

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.

A new study suggests that how parents respond to their infants’ babbling sounds may foster their infants’ language skills. Playfully mimicking or returning infant babbling lets the child know that he or she can communicate, and this knowledge helps the infant learn the complex sounds that make up speech.

Traumatic brain injury (TBI) can happen to anyone, at any age. Approximately 1.7 million people experience a TBI in the United States each year; about 53,000 die from TBI-related causes.

Researchers have used brain scans to track how young children learn to read, raising the possibility that the method could be used to diagnose young children with dyslexia and other reading disorders before they experience problems in school. Once identified, the children could be fast-tracked to interventions designed to help them overcome their reading difficulties.

Shavon Artis, Dr.P.H., M.P.H., coordinator of the NICHD-led Safe to Sleep® campaign, recently published a blog post on safe infant sleep environments for the Parents Magazine website.

Countless factors, from family and environment to genes and biology, influence a child’s growth and development. Scientists in the NICHD’s Section on Child and Family Research study how these factors affect the physical, mental, and social development of growing children, along with their health and well-being.

Learning is easier when it only requires nerve cells to rearrange existing patterns of activity than when the nerve cells have to generate new patterns, a study of monkeys has found. The scientists explored the brain’s capacity to learn through recordings of electrical activity of brain cell networks. The study was partly funded by the National Institutes of Health.

Scientists at the National Institutes of Health have created high-resolution images of the glutamate receptor, a protein that plays a key role in nerve signaling. The advance, published online in the journal Nature on August 3, 2014, opens a new window to study protein interactions in cell membranes in exquisite detail.

A new study has succeeded in creating detailed images of one group of receptors—the glutamate receptors—and this discovery may lead to therapies for these and other diseases and conditions.

Researchers at the National Institutes of Health are uncovering clues on how the brain and nervous system functions—from an unlikely source. NICHD neuroscientist Mark A. Stopher, Ph.D., studies locusts and other insects to gain insights into the workings of the human nervous system. Dr. Stopfer is an investigator in the NICHD’s Unit on Sensory Coding and Neural Ensembles.

Twenty percent of children in the United States grow up in rural communities, often experiencing higher rates of poverty and geographic isolation. Poverty is known to be stressful for young children and is associated with poor developmental outcomes. These effects can start to appear as early as 15 months of age. But the how and why—what scientists call the “mechanisms”—that lead to these poor outcomes have remained largely unknown.

Forty years ago, the Nixon presidency was ending, U.S. troops were coming home from Vietnam, and Kuo-Ping (K.P.) Huang, Ph.D., was starting his career at the NICHD.

An updated screening tool that physicians administer to parents to help determine if a very young child has autism has been shown to be much more accurate than earlier versions at identifying children who could benefit from further evaluation, according to researchers supported by the National Institutes of Health.

At the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience , held in San Diego, California, from November 9–13, more than 30,000 neuroscientists from around the world will share their latest research results and learn about new advances and opportunities in the field.

More than 65 percent of HIV-infected youth had mild to moderate impairments in fine-motor skills, memory, and other cognitive skills, although not enough to affect day-to-day functioning for most, according to a National Institutes of Health network study.

Dr. Brett Miller spoke with NICHD grantee Dr. Tom Mitchell, on using computers to recognize spoken words by analyzing the brain activity patterns of listeners.

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.