NIH Launches “Whole-Person Health” Project

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has announced two new initiatives to tackle stillbirths and “whole-person” health, respectively, across the US.

In its first announcement on September 16, the federal agency said its investigators will develop “tools, devices and other technologies” that have the potential to affect diagnosis and prevention efforts relevant to stillbirth.

In its second announcement on September 17, the NIH said that, over five years, it will develop a complete, working model of healthy human physiology to inform “whole-person” health interventions.

NIH’s plan for stillbirths

According to the NIH, stillbirths occur at a rate of 1 out of 160 deliveries in the US. This rate is considerably higher among Black, American Indian and Alaska Native people. 

More than 60% of all cases remain unexplained after the exclusion of common causes, such as congenital abnormalities, genetic factors and obstetric complications. 

To fill this knowledge gap, the agency says it will fund a Stillbirth Research Consortium with more than $37 million over five years, pending the availability of funds.

“This consortium will provide an integrated, collaborative program to support cutting edge research to identify the root causes of stillbirth and inform evidence-based strategies to address stillbirth risks,” Dr. Alison Cernich, the acting director of NIH’s Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, said in a statement. “Too many families needlessly face the grief of stillbirth.”

The NIH Stillbirth Consortium will consist of four research centers and a data coordination center:

• The Data Coordinating Center at RTI International, Research Triangle, North Carolina, will facilitate development and implementation of common projects across the research centers and ensure rigor in study data and data sharing.
• The University of California San Diego Center for Stillbirth Prevention Center will specialize in identifying the causes of placental dysfunction that underlie fetal growth restriction and contribute to stillbirth. 
• The Collaborative Action for Research to End Stillbirth Research Center at Columbia University, New York City, will use electronic health records and artificial intelligence-aided analysis to develop automated algorithms specifically for early identification of stillbirth risk and to develop novel biomarkers of underlying placental dysfunction for predicting stillbirth.
• The University of Utah Stillbirth Research Center will evaluate decreased fetal movement, stratification of stillbirth risk based on decreased fetal movement and optimal strategies for managing it.
• The Nutrition and Outcomes of Reproductive Injury and Stillbirth related Harms Research Center at Oregon Health and Science University, Portland, will identify promising interventions aimed at reducing preventable stillbirth.

NIH’s plan for “whole-health”

In another announcement, the NIH said it will create an “integrated knowledge network” of healthy physiological function.

“Biomedical research is largely organized around the study of specific organs and diseases,” Dr. Helene M. Langevin, director of NIH’s National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health, said in a statement.  

“In contrast, we do much less research on health itself, which is an integrated process involving the whole person.”

The five-year research initiative will draw from existing NIH projects, such as the Human Reference Atlas and the Human BioMolecular Atlas Program, to develop a complete, “working model of healthy human physiology.”

Future stages of the project will link common clinical measures, such as blood pressure, blood glucose and cholesterol, to major physiological functions.

“By organizing healthy physiological function into a whole-body knowledge network, researchers will be able to explore scientific questions about health in a new way,” said Langevin. “With our ability to acquire new scientific data at an increasingly dizzying speed, the importance of integrating and connecting new data to what we already know is greater than ever. The Whole Person Reference Physiome will lay a foundation for understanding the factors that drive declines in health and mechanistic pathways to health restoration.”