Research advances from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Intramural Research Program (IRP) often make headlines. Read the news releases that describe our most recent findings:
Whether you’re shedding pounds with the help of effective new medicines, slimming down after weight loss surgery or cutting calories and adding exercise, there will come a day when the numbers on the scale stop going down, and you hit the dreaded weight loss plateau.
In a recent study, Kevin Hall, a researcher at the National Institutes of Health who specializes in measuring metabolism and weight change, looked at when weight loss typically stops depending on the method people were using todrop pounds. He broke down the plateau into mathematical models using data from high-quality clinical trials of different ways to lose weight to understand why people stop losing when they do. The study published Monday in the journal Obesity.
A human antibody given to monkeys infected with the deadly Hendra virus completely protected them from disease, according to a study published by National Institutes of Health (NIH) scientists and their collaborators. Hendra and the closely related Nipah virus, both rare viruses that are part of the NIH biodefense research program, target the lungs and brain and have human case fatality rates of 60 percent and more than 75 percent, respectively. These diseases in monkeys mirror what happens in humans, and the study results are cause for hope that the antibody, named m102.4, ultimately may be developed into a possible treatment for people who become infected with these viruses.
An immune cell involved in initiating the symptoms of an allergic skin reaction may play an equally, or perhaps more important, role in suppressing the reaction once it becomes chronic. This finding in mice could have future implications for the treatment of atopic dermatitis, a chronic inflammatory skin disease that affects an estimated 10 to 20 percent of infants and young children. The research is by investigators at the National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases (NIAMS), part of the National Institutes of Health.
An international effort to replace smoky, inefficient household stoves that people commonly use in lower and middle income countries with clean, affordable, fuel efficient stoves could save nearly 2 million lives each year, according to experts from the National Institutes of Health.
An attenuated, or weakened, strain of Chlamydia trachomatis bacteria can be used as a vaccine to prevent or reduce the severity of trachoma, the world’s leading cause of infectious blindness, suggest findings from a National Institutes of Health study in monkeys.
Physicians often fail to counsel their young adult patients about excessive alcohol use, according to a study led by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA), part of the National Institutes of Health.
After its first two years of work, the Undiagnosed Diseases Program (UDP) of the National Institutes of Health is citing successes in patients whose cases have stumped specialists at leading medical institutions around the country. The researchers published the program’s first retrospective analysis in the Sept. 26, 2011 early online issue of Genetics in Medicine.
A large study of the daughters of women who had been given DES, the first synthetic form of estrogen, during pregnancy has found that exposure to the drug while in the womb (in utero) is associated with many reproductive problems and an increased risk of certain cancers and pre-cancerous conditions. The results of this analysis, conducted by researchers at the National Cancer Institute (NCI), part of the National Institutes of Health, and collaborators across the country, were published Oct. 6, 2011, in the New England Journal of Medicine.
In what may lead to a shift in treatment, the largest prospective study of children with chronic kidney disease (CKD) has confirmed some experts’ suspicions that complications occur early. The findings suggest the need for earlier, more aggressive management of blood pressure, anemia and other problems associated with kidney disease, according to Dr. Marva Moxey-Mims, a pediatric kidney specialist at the NIH.
The immune response to an H5N1 avian influenza vaccine was greatly enhanced in healthy adults if they were first primed with a DNA vaccine expressing a gene for a key H5N1 protein, researchers say. Their report describes results from two clinical studies conducted by researchers from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the National Institutes of Health.
National Institutes of Health has joined with organizations interested in Down syndrome to form a consortium that will foster the exchange of information on biomedical and biobehavioral research on the chromosomal condition.
