News

As 2018 winds down, a new slideshow highlights a selection of initiatives, therapies, and scientific advances supported by NIH’s Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD).

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

A program to teach preschoolers pre-reading, social, and thinking skills appears to have benefits through third grade, particularly in executive functioning—the mental skills that include planning, paying attention, organizing, and remembering details.

The National Institutes of Health has awarded nine research grants totaling nearly $100 million over the next five years for the Autism Centers of Excellence (ACE), a program that supports large research projects aimed at understanding and developing interventions for autism spectrum disorder (ASD).

Children start learning long before they start going to school. Find out how you can support your child's learning from birth.

A conversation with Dr. Sheri Crow, a pediatrician specializing in critical care at the Mayo Clinic, about her NICHD-funded research. Dr. Crow has explored the long-term health outcomes of children who experience traumatic injury or a life-threatening illness in early childhood.

NICHD Director Dr. Diana Bianchi shares some thoughts about joining NICHD.

An instructional program for parents helps young children retain the literacy skills and positive learning behaviors acquired in Head Start through to the end of the kindergarten year, according to researchers funded by the National Institutes of Health.

In his recent article in The Huffington Post, Dr. Guttmacher highlights the importance of reading every day with children.

Children learn to read by building a number of skills. Learn more about how reading works in this slideshow.

The Cincinnati MR Imaging of Neurodevelopment (C-MIND) study was launched in 2009 to establish a new resource for the research community: a database of scans showing the structure and activity of the growing brain. C-MIND has taken an unprecedented look at what’s going on inside the heads of hundreds of kids from ages 0 to 18.

NICHD supports a variety of research projects and networks that are useful to neuroscientists. Find a detailed list here.

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.

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.

Preschool educational interventions have long been studied for their value in preparing children for school. Recent studies, however, indicate that these interventions might do much more, possibly affecting social and emotional skills later in life, and even adult physical health.

Head Start is a program which provides low-income children with preschool education, health care, and nutrition services. A recent analysis of a national study on Head Start shows that 1 year of the program improves children’s math, literacy, and vocabulary skills.

Alfred Nobel once said, “The observation of and the search for similarities and differences are the basis of all human knowledge.” For some NICHD-supported researchers, this search for similarities led in an unexpected direction.