Children exposed to high indoor levels of pet or pest allergens during infancy have a lower risk of developing asthma by 7 years of age, new research supported by the National Institutes of Health reveals. The findings, published September 19 in the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology, may provide clues for the design of strategies to prevent asthma from developing.

New online toolkit is now available for nurses and other health professionals looking to integrate genomics into patient care.

Three interventions designed for follow up of patients who are identified with suicide risk in hospital emergency departments save lives and are cost effective relative to usual care. A study led by researchers at the National Institute of Mental Health modeled the use of the approaches in emergency departments and found that all three interventions compare favorably with a standard benchmark of cost-effectiveness used in evaluating healthcare costs.

Can a high-tech water bottle help reduce the recurrence of kidney stones? What about a financial incentive? Those are questions researchers funded by the National Institutes of Health will seek to answer as they begin recruiting participants for a two-year clinical trial at four sites across the country.

The NIH's National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences' Tissue Chip for Drug Screening program announced 13 two-year awards totaling about $15 million per year to develop 3-D platforms that model human disease. Tissue chips support living cells and tissues to mimic biological functions of human organs and systems and provide a new way to test potential drug efficacy. The awards may enable scientists to better understand disease mechanisms and predict drug responses.

Scientists at the National Institutes of Health have expanded the understanding of how chronic inflammation and persistent immune activation associated with HIV infection drive cardiovascular disease risk in people living with HIV. People living with HIV are up to twice as likely to experience heart attacks, strokes and other forms of cardiovascular disease as people who do not have the virus, even when HIV infection is well-controlled with the use of antiretroviral therapy.