News
NICHD Director Dr. Diana Bianchi discusses her recent travels to Kenya and Las Vegas, and provides updates on the NICHD strategic plan.
A 5-minute delay in clamping the umbilical cord after birth may benefit an infant’s developing brain, according to a small NIH-funded study. By 4 months of age, the brains of infants who underwent delayed clamping had more myelin, a brain-insulating material, compared to those whose cords were clamped within 20 seconds.
Teenagers who reach for objects, such as food or makeup, while driving increase their risk of crashing nearly seven times, according to researchers at NIH. The researchers also found that manually dialing, texting or browsing the web on a phone while driving doubled a teen’s crash risk.
A new protocol studied by NICHD-funded researchers could help emergency room physicians rule out life-threatening bacterial infections among infants who have fevers.
Newborns infected with herpes simplex virus (HSV) can be appropriately treated with acyclovir, a drug typically prescribed to adults for the treatment of HSV infections. The Food and Drug Administration changed the acyclovir labeling based on information from an NICHD-funded study.
For women in resource-poor settings, taking a certain daily nutritional supplement before conception or in early pregnancy may provide enough of a boost to improve growth of the fetus, according to a study funded by NIH.
NICHD researcher Keiko Ozato, Ph.D., who started her NICHD laboratory in 1981, describes early challenges that shaped her life and her research career.
The anti-inflammatory properties of testosterone appear to protect male mouse embryos from certain types of DNA damage and inflammation that are usually fatal to female mouse embryos, according to a recent NICHD-supported study.
Researchers funded by NIH have linked elevated levels of an immune system hormone to the adult cognitive decline that often occurs in people who experienced abuse as children. The hormone, interleukin-6, is involved in the swelling or inflammation produced in response to injury.
Excessive weight gain during pregnancy could permanently slow metabolism and lead to weight gain later in life, according to the results of a mouse study funded by NIH.
NIH recently released a draft of its first-ever Strategic Plan for Nutrition Research, which aims to help advance the understanding of interactions between diet, nutritional status, biological processes, and the environment.
NICHD supports a variety of resources and tools for researchers.
Featured this Month:
The Imaging Research Center at the Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center constructed the Pediatric Brain Templates using brain-imaging data collected from a large population of normal, healthy children. These data can be used within statistical parametric mapping for spatial normalization, tissue segmentation, and visualization of imaging study results. Although NICHD funding has ended, the templates are available free-of-charge for research purposes only.
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