NIH MedlinePlus Magazine, Spring 2008

NIH MedlinePlus Magazine is a new quarterly guide for patients and their families. It brings the latest and most authoritative medical and healthcare information from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) as featured online on the MedlinePlus Web site.

Childhood Diseases
What Parents Need to Know

During the passage from infancy to young adulthood, all children get sick at some point. For most American children, however, sickness is much less frequent, traumatic, and life threatening than it was just several decades ago. Research by a number of NIH institutes and centers is continuing to improve the outlook for childhood diseases every day.

When the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) was established at the National Institutes of Health 45 years ago, the world of children’s health was a very different place than it is today. Since then, NICHD research has helped improve the health and well being of children at every age of development.

“Since the NICHD was founded,” says NICHD Director Duane Alexander, M.D., “our research has contributed to the decline in infant mortality of more than 70 percent, the 93 percent reduction in the rate of mother-to-child transmission of the AIDS virus, the elimination of five major causes of mental retardation, successful treatments for infertility, an effective intervention for reducing a major cause of premature birth, and many other benefits.”