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Studies target heart, lung, and sleep disorders associated with condition Each year, about 5,300 babies are born in the United States with Down syndrome, a genetic disease that is associated with intellectual and physical challenges. People with the condition have a high risk of heart defects, pulmonary hypertension, sleep apnea, gastrointestinal...

Brandie Taylor is watching her teenage son, Hunter Banegas, grow into a man. She is proud of his talent and his embrace of Kumeyaay Bird Singing, which is performed at traditional gatherings of their tribe, the Iipay Nation of Santa Ysabel, near San Diego, Calif. But 13 years ago, a future filled with song—a future with Hunter—seemed doubtful. When...

En el 2000, Mercy Mendoza, a los 3 años, languidecía con una enfermedad misteriosa. Su abuela, desesperanzada, compró un sitio donde enterrarla en el pueblito de Honduras donde vivían. La hinchazón, el dolor y la inmovilidad estaban erosionando rápidamente su salud. Finalmente, un médico que había estudiado en los Estados Unidos reconoció su...

In 2000, a mysterious disease was making 3-year-old Mercy Mendoza so ill that her grandmother bought a burial plot for her in the little town in Honduras where they lived. Swelling, pain, and immobility were fast eroding her health. Finally, a doctor who had been trained in the United States recognized her condition: It was sickle cell disease, an...

If a woman is pregnant and chronic high blood pressure is seriously high, doctors typically don’t debate what to do. They treat it—and fas t—mainly to minimize the risk for strokes and other potentially deadly cardiovascular events. But what if the woman’s chronic high blood pressure is considered, well, mild—say, less than 160/105 mm Hg? As it...

Poor sleep may seem like a normal fallout of pregnancy, but research shows it can be a pernicious problem, with long-term ill effects on a woman’s cardiovascular health. Pregnant women who suffer from sleep-disordered breathing, particularly sleep apnea, are at higher risk for both gestational diabetes and hypertensive disorders of pregnancy, the...

Might pave the way for new and improved treatments for a wide variety of respiratory diseases Maps may be great tools for helping you find your way around unfamiliar places, but in the future, a new type of map well might help save your life. Welcome to the Molecular Atlas of Lung Development Program, or LungMAP, a historic effort to help...

When CBS’s 60 Minutes aired the compelling story of a Florida woman whose severe sickle cell disease symptoms were alleviated with a cutting edge gene therapy technique, people listened. A lot of them. The treatment happened at the National Institutes of Health, and since the showcasing of its dramatic success, NIH has been responding to scores of...

Here’s something that might surprise: blood transfusions are the most common medical procedure in the United States, with millions of Americans receiving them each year. They help save lives and that’s in part because the nation’s supplies of donated blood are safer than ever from pathogens such as HIV, hepatitis viruses, and Zika, researchers say...

Advances in Congenital Heart Disease Research Are Helping Kids Thrive In 1949 when the National Heart Institute—not yet the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute—began awarding research grants in pediatric cardiovascular disease, among the first was to a surgeon named Alfred Blalock, M.D. With his colleagues at Johns Hopkins University—Helen...