Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development

HRT supplies the body with hormones that drop during perimenopause and menopause.

Joining us now with more insight is Dr. Dorothy Fink, Deputy Director of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.

Dr. Fink, we should also note you're an endocrinologist as well.

So why should our viewers watching this

So in 2003, a study is published.

A study is done under the NICHD looking at a synthetic hormone.

In this case, it's synthetic progestin to see whether it can prevent – recurrent preterm birth so the mom's come mom comes into you in the office she says i had my first baby at 32 weeks that's a preterm birth less than 37 weeks and do you have anything you can offer her we never really did this study said well let's see if injecting her with 17p will help to prevent the recurrent preterm birth.

So that trial was done, and then the result came out in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2003, and it was much better.

Hopefully we'll get some good discussion.

But the first article we're going to cover was the NICHD, like the NRN PDA expectant management RCT that was published this year.

Basically looking at whether or not expectant management, and this is just a subset of babies.

So it's our 22 weeks to 28 week babies.

I'm so honored to be joined by Dr. Dorothy Fink.

Thank you so much for being here, Dr. Fink, director, deputy director and acting director of the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development at the NIH.

That's a mouthful, but your work and your breadth of work across your career is so appreciated, and thanks for giving us your time.

This is such an exciting initiative.

That's gonna be true across the board.

And groundbreaking in its definition is really about what does that agency care about? If you are in, even still to this day, even if you are in a women's health digital aspect where you're tracking specific biomarkers for women who are pregnant, then apply for NICHD, the National Institute for Child Health and Human Development.

They're going to be interested in that.

If you are doing anything in Alzheimer's, dementia, early predictions, tracking, diagnostics, whatever, apply to the National Institute on Aging.

So our, our loss is the community's gain.

John is now the director of, uh, the, the Kennedy Eunice Shriver, um, uh, National Institute for Childhood Health and Human Development, NICHD for short.

And just last week, he was also appointed the chair of the Interagency Autism Coordinating Committee, the IACC.

Uh, so, I mean, John is just an outstanding clinician, outstanding human being, someone that I...

no financial disclosures.

I have a career development grant awarded by the NIH and NICHD.

All right.

So we talked last week about how vitamin K works.

And just before we recorded this conversation, there was another development.

Dr. John Gaetano, I believe I got that right, Silvia, you can tell me [laughs] the newly appointed director of NIH's Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, was named the new chair of IACC, and Silvia is still on the committee and has described the change as a transition from creating the strategic plan to the work that really matters, which is implementing it.

So we have a lot to talk about, but before we get into-

Yeah