Half of infants born with severe congenital heart disease go on to develop neurodevelopmental disorders, which may include cognitive, motor, social, and language impairments.
An international team of researchers recently identified gene mutations that can cause severe, difficult-to-treat forms of childhood epilepsy. Many of the mutations disrupt functioning in the synapse, the highly dynamic junction at which nerve cells communicate with one another.
New research from The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania details how a diabetes-related gene functions on a biological pathway that affects the release of insulin.
After analyzing the DNA from thousands of patients, investigators from Children’s Hospital have uncovered several gene networks that may play important roles in autism.
Two recent studies expand the list of genes associated with body fat and body mass index (BMI), and their connection to heart disease, high blood pressure, and diabetes.
Since the completion of the Human Genome Project, there has been a natural surge in biomedical research aimed at gene discovery. Using genome-wide association studies (GWAS), bioinformatics, and other approaches, this process has focused largely on determining what genes are implicated in specific diseases.
The United States has a weight problem: according to the CDC, more than one-third of American adults are obese. Moreover, as of 2010 one-third of children were either overweight or obese, with the rates of obesity doubling in children and tripling in adolescents in the past thirty years.
