NIH Radio Archive
June 2009 Audio Reports
Your immune system plays an important function in your health—it protects you against viruses, bacteria, and other toxins that can cause disease. In autoinflammatory diseases, however, the immune system goes awry, causing unprovoked and dangerous inflammation. Now, researchers have discovered a new autoinflammatory syndrome, a rare genetic condition that affects children around the time of birth.
Sarcoidosis is a multi-systemic inflammatory disorder of unknown cause, and has no cure. Sarcoidosis affects people of all ages and races; however, it's more common among women than men, and among African Americans and those of Asian, German, Irish, Puerto Rican and Scandinavian origin. In the U.S., the disease affects African Americans somewhat more often and more severely than whites. Currently, there are several NIH-funded studies recruiting volunteers for studies on sarcoidosis.
This study reveals that low-key and attention-grabbing anti-smoking PSAs stimulate different patterns of activity in smokers' brains; and that smokers are more likely to remember seeing the low-key PSAs than the attention-grabbing ones.
The National Institutes of Health is launching its first drug development pipeline to produce new treatments for rare and neglected diseases. With a new program specifically intended to stimulate research collaborations, NIH is hoping to take the risk out of making drugs that are often less profitable.
The health of our skin—one of the body's first lines of defense against illness and injury—depends upon the delicate balance between our own cells and the millions of bacteria and other one-celled microbes that live on its surface. To better understand this balance, National Institutes of Health researchers have set out to explore the skin's microbiome, which is all of the DNA, or genomes, of all of the microbes that inhabit human skin. Their initial analysis, published recently in the journal Science, reveals that our skin is home to a much wider array of bacteria than previously thought.
A recent study has found that citalopram, a medication commonly prescribed to children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD), was no more effective than placebo treatment for these children.  FREE MP3 audio reports from the National Institutes of Health, your reliable health information source. Questions? Contact: This page was last reviewed on
June 26, 2009
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