what are the best research studies

Frontiers | Science News

• Science News

Research Topics

Top 10 research topics from 2021.

Find the answers to your biggest research questions from 2021. With collective views of over 3.7 million, researchers explored topics spanning from nutritional immunology and political misinformation to sustainable agriculture and the human-dog bond .

Research Topics:

1. Infectious disease

• 1,643,000 views
• 29 articles

2. Nutritional immunology

• 768,000 views

3. Music therapy

• 268,000 views
• 44 articles

4. Political misinformation

• 219,000 views
• 11 articles

5. Plant science

• 198,000 views
• 15 articles

6. Sustainable agriculture

• 168,000 views
• 49 articles

7. Mental health

• 136,000 views
• 22 articles

8. Aging brains

• 134,000 views
• 18 articles

Benefits of human-dog interactions

• 229,000 views
• 13 articles

10. Mood disorders

• 102,000 views
• 12 articles

Shape the future of your field

Become a guest editor for an article collection around your own research theme. Benefit from increased impact and discoverability, a dedicated platform and support team, and rigorous peer review for every paper.

Suggest your topic

Post related info

January 17, 2022

Frontiers Communications

Post categories, sustainability, related subjects, research topics, related content.

Pride Month 2021: Research Topics on Visibility, Unity, and Equality

International Earth Day 2021: Research Topics to Restore Our Earth

World Bee Day 2021: Research Topics to Build Back Better for Bees

Latest posts.

Big data, AI, and personalized medicine: scientists reveal playbook aiming to revolutionize healthcare

Registration open: Dr Eric Topol to explore how AI will shape the future of healthcare at Frontiers Forum virtual event

Babies in the womb exposed to two languages hear speech differently when born

Biodiversity loss: three Research Topics revealing threats and solutions

Screen time not the main factor making parent-child interactions worse, study finds

The 10 best research stories of 2021

Is the year over already?

2021 brought its fair share of big news and research breakthroughs, COVID and non-COVID alike. Given UC is the  global leader in cited scholarship , it’s no surprise that each campus produced numerous new ways of understanding our world.

We’ve rounded up some of the best stories from each campus: Some were extensively covered by the media, like UC San Francisco’s novel treatment for severe depression; others were underrated but deserving of more attention, like UC Santa Cruz’s study on the social factors that affect teen gender identity. Together, these stories show how the University of California propels research that changes the world.

1. Curing sickle cell disease (UC Berkeley, UCLA, UC San Francisco)

Using the CRISPR/Cas9 gene-editing technology discovered by UC Berkeley biochemist Jennifer Doudna, physicians are launching clinical trials aimed at correcting the defect that causes sickle cell disease. The inherited blood disorder, which is painful and often fatal, affects about 1 in every 365 Black or African American births. The trials will be led by doctors at UCSF and UCLA and are expected to begin by mid-2022. Tapping into UCLA’s expertise in genetic analysis and cell manufacturing and the decades-long expertise at  UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital Oakland  in cord blood and marrow transplantation and sickle cell gene therapy, they have the potential to create a cure for sickle cell disease that is both affordable and accessible. Doudna won a Nobel Prize in chemistry in 2020 for the CRISPR technology that makes these trials possible. This research is being funded by the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine, the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute-led Cure Sickle Cell Initiative, and the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation.

Learn more:   https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/news/fda-approves-first-test-crispr-correct-genetic-defect-causing-sickle-cell-disease  and  https://www.ucsf.edu/news/2021/03/420137/uc-consortium-launches-first-clinical-trial-using-crispr-correct-gene-defect

2. A new type of supernova (UC Santa Barbara)

Scientists found the first convincing evidence for a new type of stellar explosion — an electron-capture supernova. The concept of an electron-capture supernova had been theorized for 40 years without any real-world proof. The discovery, led by UC Santa Barbara scientists at Las Cumbres Observatory, has been called the Rosetta Stone of astrophysics because it is helping scientists decode thousand-year-old records from cultures around the world, including a supernova from A.D. 1045 so bright it was seen for 23 days, even at daytime.

Learn more:   https://www.news.ucsb.edu/2021/020338/goldilocks-supernova

3. Social factors affect teen gender expression (UC Santa Cruz)

A UC Santa Cruz study showed that a growing number of Gen Z teens are identifying as nonbinary — but this is influenced by regional differences in levels of resources, rights, and visibility for sexual and gender diversity. While almost 25 percent of the LGBTQ+ youth surveyed expressed some form of nonbinary gender, it was more prevalent in those who lived in the Bay Area compared to the Central Valley. Additionally, teens who were assigned female at birth seemed more comfortable with these forms of gender expression, whereas those who were assigned male at birth faced strong pressures to conform to standards of masculinity. The research sheds light on factors that can support or hinder sexual and gender expression among teens.

Learn more:   https://news.ucsc.edu/2021/03/adolescent-gender-sexual-identity.html

4. Novel treatment for severe depression (UC San Francisco)

One of the most hopeful UC San Francisco stories this year was the successful treatment of severe, previously untreatable depression using customizable deep brain stimulation. Physicians were able to tap into a patient's unique brain circuit involved in her depression and interrupt it using the equivalent of a pacemaker for the brain. The breakthrough was hailed as a landmark in the years-long effort to apply advances in neuroscience to the treatment of psychiatric disorders. This precision medicine approach provided the patient with immediate, long-term symptom relief and could be transformative for other patients with chronic, treatment-resistant depression.

Learn more:   https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/news/hope-treatment-resistant-depression-brain-stimulation-demand

5. Tracking global wastewater testing for COVID-19 (UC Merced)

After the COVID-19 pandemic struck, scientists across the globe realized they could track the virus by testing sewage water. UC Merced professor Colleen Naughton pioneered a dashboard to host global findings, an innovation that earned her the 2021 Grand Prize in University Research by the American Academy of Environmental Engineers and Scientists. Wastewater monitoring allows scientists to test an entire group of people for COVID-19, not just one person at a time. It has also been shown to be effective at predicting outbreaks of COVID-19. Many cities, universities and countries have now adopted this testing approach and have reinforced the value of Naughton’s dashboard by sharing their results.

Learn more:   https://news.ucmerced.edu/news/2021/naughton-lab-creates-dashboard-track-global-wastewater-testing-covid-19

6. Increased wildfire linked to human-induced climate change (UCLA)

Wildfires have been increasing over the last two decades. But how much of that trend has been caused by human-induced climate change and how much could be explained by other factors? This year, scientists from UCLA and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory set out to find answers. They analyzed a key variable tied to wildfire risk known as “vapor pressure deficit” — a term that reflects warm, dry air — and determined that 68 percent of the increase in vapor pressure deficit across the western U.S. between 1979 and 2020 was likely due to human-caused global warming. This suggests that human-induced climate change is the culprit for increasing fire weather in the western United States and that the trend is likely to worsen in the years ahead.

Learn more:   https://newsroom.ucla.edu/releases/frequent-wildfires-human-caused-climate-change

7. Feeding cattle seaweed reduces their greenhouse gas emissions (UC Davis)

Of greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S., 10 percent comes from agriculture — and half of that from cows and other ruminant animals belching methane throughout the day as they digest. In 2018, researchers from UC Davis were able to reduce methane emissions from dairy cows by over 50 percent by supplementing their diet with seaweed for two weeks. The seaweed inhibits an enzyme in the cow’s digestive system that contributes to methane production. This year, they tested whether those reductions were sustainable over time by feeding cows a touch of seaweed every day for five months. The results were clear: Cattle that consumed seaweed emitted much less methane, and there was no drop-off in efficacy over time.

Learn more: https://www.ucdavis.edu/climate/news/feeding-cattle-seaweed-reduces-their-greenhouse-gas-emissions-82-percent

8. Flame retardants linked to autistic-like behavior (UC Riverside)

Polybrominated diphenyl ethers, or PBDEs, are a class of ubiquitous fire-retardant chemicals, found in upholstery, carpets, curtains, electronics and even infant products. Thanks to the inadvertent digestion of contaminated household dust, they can also be detected in breast milk around the world. A research team led by UC Riverside scientists found that when female mice exposed to PBDEs pass on these chemicals to their developing offspring, the female offspring show traits similar to autism spectrum disorders. In addition to shedding light on a potential cause of autism, the study signals the importance of toxicology studies so that chemicals like PBDEs can be investigated before they are commercially released.

Learn more: https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/news/flame-retardants-linked-autistic-behavior

9. Plant extract to prevent morphine addiction (UC Irvine)

Over the past two decades, dramatic increases in opioid overdose mortality have occurred in the United States and other nations, with the COVID-19 pandemic only worsening the problem. A UC Irvine-led study has pointed to a possible new therapy in an unlikely place — YHS, an extract of the plant Corydalis yanhusuo, which prevents morphine tolerance and dependence while also reversing opiate addiction. Even better, YHS has been used as an analgesic in traditional Chinese medicine for centuries. It is considered safe and readily available for purchase, either online or as a “botanical” in certain grocery stores. The extract could have an immediate, positive impact in curbing the opioid epidemic.

Learn more: https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/news/uc-irvine-led-study-finds-medicinal-plant-extract-prevent-morphine-addiction

10. No serious COVID-19 vaccine side effects in breastfeeding moms (UC San Diego)

Mothers who are breastfeeding can get vaccinated and still continue to breastfeed their babies, researchers at the UC San Diego School of Medicine reported. Researchers found that breastfeeding mothers who received either the Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna vaccination reported the same localized symptoms as non-breastfeeding women, with no serious side effects in their breastfed infants. The results not only demonstrated that the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines were not red flags for breastfeeding mothers but encouraged lactating women to get the COVID-19 vaccine and to continue to breastfeed their infants: Thankfully, they did not have to choose one over the other.

Learn more: https://health.ucsd.edu/news/releases/Pages/2021-09-08-study-no-serious-covid-19-vaccine-side-effects-in-breastfeeding-moms-infants.aspx

Keep reading

UC Irvine scientists create long-lasting, cobalt-free,…

The finding promises to help manufacturers move beyond the controversial metal cobalt.

We need a staph vaccine: here’s why we don’t have one

Research from UC San Diego explains the clinical failure of dozens of candidate vaccines for one of the most common human infections; it also suggests a way to fix the problem.

• Our Mission

The 10 Most Significant Education Studies of 2021

From reframing our notion of “good” schools to mining the magic of expert teachers, here’s a curated list of must-read research from 2021.

It was a year of unprecedented hardship for teachers and school leaders. We pored through hundreds of studies to see if we could follow the trail of exactly what happened: The research revealed a complex portrait of a grueling year during which persistent issues of burnout and mental and physical health impacted millions of educators. Meanwhile, many of the old debates continued: Does paper beat digital? Is project-based learning as effective as direct instruction? How do you define what a “good” school is?

Other studies grabbed our attention, and in a few cases, made headlines. Researchers from the University of Chicago and Columbia University turned artificial intelligence loose on some 1,130 award-winning children’s books in search of invisible patterns of bias. (Spoiler alert: They found some.) Another study revealed why many parents are reluctant to support social and emotional learning in schools—and provided hints about how educators can flip the script.

1. What Parents Fear About SEL (and How to Change Their Minds)

When researchers at the Fordham Institute asked parents to rank phrases associated with social and emotional learning , nothing seemed to add up. The term “social-emotional learning” was very unpopular; parents wanted to steer their kids clear of it. But when the researchers added a simple clause, forming a new phrase—”social-emotional & academic learning”—the program shot all the way up to No. 2 in the rankings.

What gives?

Parents were picking up subtle cues in the list of SEL-related terms that irked or worried them, the researchers suggest. Phrases like “soft skills” and “growth mindset” felt “nebulous” and devoid of academic content. For some, the language felt suspiciously like “code for liberal indoctrination.”

But the study suggests that parents might need the simplest of reassurances to break through the political noise. Removing the jargon, focusing on productive phrases like “life skills,” and relentlessly connecting SEL to academic progress puts parents at ease—and seems to save social and emotional learning in the process.

2. The Secret Management Techniques of Expert Teachers

In the hands of experienced teachers, classroom management can seem almost invisible: Subtle techniques are quietly at work behind the scenes, with students falling into orderly routines and engaging in rigorous academic tasks almost as if by magic. 

That’s no accident, according to new research . While outbursts are inevitable in school settings, expert teachers seed their classrooms with proactive, relationship-building strategies that often prevent misbehavior before it erupts. They also approach discipline more holistically than their less-experienced counterparts, consistently reframing misbehavior in the broader context of how lessons can be more engaging, or how clearly they communicate expectations.

Focusing on the underlying dynamics of classroom behavior—and not on surface-level disruptions—means that expert teachers often look the other way at all the right times, too. Rather than rise to the bait of a minor breach in etiquette, a common mistake of new teachers, they tend to play the long game, asking questions about the origins of misbehavior, deftly navigating the terrain between discipline and student autonomy, and opting to confront misconduct privately when possible.

3. The Surprising Power of Pretesting

Asking students to take a practice test before they’ve even encountered the material may seem like a waste of time—after all, they’d just be guessing.

But new research concludes that the approach, called pretesting, is actually more effective than other typical study strategies. Surprisingly, pretesting even beat out taking practice tests after learning the material, a proven strategy endorsed by cognitive scientists and educators alike. In the study, students who took a practice test before learning the material outperformed their peers who studied more traditionally by 49 percent on a follow-up test, while outperforming students who took practice tests after studying the material by 27 percent.

The researchers hypothesize that the “generation of errors” was a key to the strategy’s success, spurring student curiosity and priming them to “search for the correct answers” when they finally explored the new material—and adding grist to a 2018 study that found that making educated guesses helped students connect background knowledge to new material.

Learning is more durable when students do the hard work of correcting misconceptions, the research suggests, reminding us yet again that being wrong is an important milestone on the road to being right.

4. Confronting an Old Myth About Immigrant Students

Immigrant students are sometimes portrayed as a costly expense to the education system, but new research is systematically dismantling that myth.

In a 2021 study , researchers analyzed over 1.3 million academic and birth records for students in Florida communities, and concluded that the presence of immigrant students actually has “a positive effect on the academic achievement of U.S.-born students,” raising test scores as the size of the immigrant school population increases. The benefits were especially powerful for low-income students.

While immigrants initially “face challenges in assimilation that may require additional school resources,” the researchers concluded, hard work and resilience may allow them to excel and thus “positively affect exposed U.S.-born students’ attitudes and behavior.” But according to teacher Larry Ferlazzo, the improvements might stem from the fact that having English language learners in classes improves pedagogy , pushing teachers to consider “issues like prior knowledge, scaffolding, and maximizing accessibility.”

5. A Fuller Picture of What a ‘Good’ School Is

It’s time to rethink our definition of what a “good school” is, researchers assert in a study published in late 2020.⁣ That’s because typical measures of school quality like test scores often provide an incomplete and misleading picture, the researchers found.

The study looked at over 150,000 ninth-grade students who attended Chicago public schools and concluded that emphasizing the social and emotional dimensions of learning—relationship-building, a sense of belonging, and resilience, for example—improves high school graduation and college matriculation rates for both high- and low-income students, beating out schools that focus primarily on improving test scores.⁣

“Schools that promote socio-emotional development actually have a really big positive impact on kids,” said lead researcher C. Kirabo Jackson in an interview with Edutopia . “And these impacts are particularly large for vulnerable student populations who don’t tend to do very well in the education system.”

The findings reinforce the importance of a holistic approach to measuring student progress, and are a reminder that schools—and teachers—can influence students in ways that are difficult to measure, and may only materialize well into the future.⁣

6. Teaching Is Learning

One of the best ways to learn a concept is to teach it to someone else. But do you actually have to step into the shoes of a teacher, or does the mere expectation of teaching do the trick?

In a 2021 study , researchers split students into two groups and gave them each a science passage about the Doppler effect—a phenomenon associated with sound and light waves that explains the gradual change in tone and pitch as a car races off into the distance, for example. One group studied the text as preparation for a test; the other was told that they’d be teaching the material to another student.

The researchers never carried out the second half of the activity—students read the passages but never taught the lesson. All of the participants were then tested on their factual recall of the Doppler effect, and their ability to draw deeper conclusions from the reading.

The upshot? Students who prepared to teach outperformed their counterparts in both duration and depth of learning, scoring 9 percent higher on factual recall a week after the lessons concluded, and 24 percent higher on their ability to make inferences. The research suggests that asking students to prepare to teach something—or encouraging them to think “could I teach this to someone else?”—can significantly alter their learning trajectories.

7. A Disturbing Strain of Bias in Kids’ Books

Some of the most popular and well-regarded children’s books—Caldecott and Newbery honorees among them—persistently depict Black, Asian, and Hispanic characters with lighter skin, according to new research .

Using artificial intelligence, researchers combed through 1,130 children’s books written in the last century, comparing two sets of diverse children’s books—one a collection of popular books that garnered major literary awards, the other favored by identity-based awards. The software analyzed data on skin tone, race, age, and gender.

Among the findings: While more characters with darker skin color begin to appear over time, the most popular books—those most frequently checked out of libraries and lining classroom bookshelves—continue to depict people of color in lighter skin tones. More insidiously, when adult characters are “moral or upstanding,” their skin color tends to appear lighter, the study’s lead author, Anjali Aduki,  told The 74 , with some books converting “Martin Luther King Jr.’s chocolate complexion to a light brown or beige.” Female characters, meanwhile, are often seen but not heard.

Cultural representations are a reflection of our values, the researchers conclude: “Inequality in representation, therefore, constitutes an explicit statement of inequality of value.”

8. The Never-Ending ‘Paper Versus Digital’ War

The argument goes like this: Digital screens turn reading into a cold and impersonal task; they’re good for information foraging, and not much more. “Real” books, meanwhile, have a heft and “tactility”  that make them intimate, enchanting—and irreplaceable.

But researchers have often found weak or equivocal evidence for the superiority of reading on paper. While a recent study concluded that paper books yielded better comprehension than e-books when many of the digital tools had been removed, the effect sizes were small. A 2021 meta-analysis further muddies the water: When digital and paper books are “mostly similar,” kids comprehend the print version more readily—but when enhancements like motion and sound “target the story content,” e-books generally have the edge.

Nostalgia is a force that every new technology must eventually confront. There’s plenty of evidence that writing with pen and paper encodes learning more deeply than typing. But new digital book formats come preloaded with powerful tools that allow readers to annotate, look up words, answer embedded questions, and share their thinking with other readers.

We may not be ready to admit it, but these are precisely the kinds of activities that drive deeper engagement, enhance comprehension, and leave us with a lasting memory of what we’ve read. The future of e-reading, despite the naysayers, remains promising.

9. New Research Makes a Powerful Case for PBL

Many classrooms today still look like they did 100 years ago, when students were preparing for factory jobs. But the world’s moved on: Modern careers demand a more sophisticated set of skills—collaboration, advanced problem-solving, and creativity, for example—and those can be difficult to teach in classrooms that rarely give students the time and space to develop those competencies.

Project-based learning (PBL) would seem like an ideal solution. But critics say PBL places too much responsibility on novice learners, ignoring the evidence about the effectiveness of direct instruction and ultimately undermining subject fluency. Advocates counter that student-centered learning and direct instruction can and should coexist in classrooms.

Now two new large-scale studies —encompassing over 6,000 students in 114 diverse schools across the nation—provide evidence that a well-structured, project-based approach boosts learning for a wide range of students.

In the studies, which were funded by Lucas Education Research, a sister division of Edutopia , elementary and high school students engaged in challenging projects that had them designing water systems for local farms, or creating toys using simple household objects to learn about gravity, friction, and force. Subsequent testing revealed notable learning gains—well above those experienced by students in traditional classrooms—and those gains seemed to raise all boats, persisting across socioeconomic class, race, and reading levels.

10. Tracking a Tumultuous Year for Teachers

The Covid-19 pandemic cast a long shadow over the lives of educators in 2021, according to a year’s worth of research.

The average teacher’s workload suddenly “spiked last spring,” wrote the Center for Reinventing Public Education in its January 2021 report, and then—in defiance of the laws of motion—simply never let up. By the fall, a RAND study recorded an astonishing shift in work habits: 24 percent of teachers reported that they were working 56 hours or more per week, compared to 5 percent pre-pandemic.

The vaccine was the promised land, but when it arrived nothing seemed to change. In an April 2021 survey  conducted four months after the first vaccine was administered in New York City, 92 percent of teachers said their jobs were more stressful than prior to the pandemic, up from 81 percent in an earlier survey.

It wasn’t just the length of the work days; a close look at the research reveals that the school system’s failure to adjust expectations was ruinous. It seemed to start with the obligations of hybrid teaching, which surfaced in Edutopia ’s coverage of overseas school reopenings. In June 2020, well before many U.S. schools reopened, we reported that hybrid teaching was an emerging problem internationally, and warned that if the “model is to work well for any period of time,” schools must “recognize and seek to reduce the workload for teachers.” Almost eight months later, a 2021 RAND study identified hybrid teaching as a primary source of teacher stress in the U.S., easily outpacing factors like the health of a high-risk loved one.

New and ever-increasing demands for tech solutions put teachers on a knife’s edge. In several important 2021 studies, researchers concluded that teachers were being pushed to adopt new technology without the “resources and equipment necessary for its correct didactic use.” Consequently, they were spending more than 20 hours a week adapting lessons for online use, and experiencing an unprecedented erosion of the boundaries between their work and home lives, leading to an unsustainable “always on” mentality. When it seemed like nothing more could be piled on—when all of the lights were blinking red—the federal government restarted standardized testing .

Change will be hard; many of the pathologies that exist in the system now predate the pandemic. But creating strict school policies that separate work from rest, eliminating the adoption of new tech tools without proper supports, distributing surveys regularly to gauge teacher well-being, and above all listening to educators to identify and confront emerging problems might be a good place to start, if the research can be believed.

Top Science News

Latest top headlines.

• Today's Healthcare
• 3-D Printing
• Child Development
• Birth Control
• Pharmacology
• Mental Health
• Mental Health Research
• Extrasolar Planets
• STEM Education
• Communications
• World Development
• Robotics Research
• Artificial Intelligence
• Human Evolution
• Anthropology
• Resource Shortage
• Environmental Policies
• Insects (including Butterflies)
• Invasive Species
• Microbes and More
• Treating Cataracts and Other Eye Conditions
• Why the Brain Can Robustly Recognize B&W Images
• Birth Control Pill for Men?
• Mental Disorders May Spread Thru Social Networks

Top Physical/Tech

• Intriguing World Sized Between Earth, Venus
• 'Exo-Venus' With Earth-Like Temps
• World Leaders Need to Wake Up to AI Risks
• 3D Printing Robot, AI, Extreme Shock-Absorption

Top Environment

• Early Arrival of Palaeolithic People On Cyprus
• Global Clean Water Crisis Looms Large
• Ants Forage Better When Given a Little Caffeine
• Milk from 1940s Had Antibiotic Resistance

Health News

Latest health headlines.

• Stroke Prevention
• Heart Disease
• Computer Programming
• Alzheimer's
• Disorders and Syndromes
• Gender Difference
• Healthy Aging
• Alzheimer's Research
• ADD and ADHD
• Schizophrenia
• Intelligence
• Brain Tumor
• Diet and Weight Loss
• Alternative Medicine
• Infant's Health
• Cholesterol
• Osteoporosis
• Bone and Spine

Health & Medicine

• Extreme Temps May Up Risk of Stroke Mortality
• New Weapon Against Dementia
• Transitioning Gender Not Linked to Depression
• Climbing the Social Ladder Slows Dementia

Mind & Brain

• ADHD and Emotional Problems
• Genetic Insights Into Schizophrenia
• Key Nutrients Linked to Slower Brain Aging
• Pomegranates and Treating Alzheimer's

Living Well

• Take a Keto-Break? New Study
• Matcha Mouthwash Protects Against Periodontitis
• Prioritizing of Infants for RSV Immunization
• New Therapeutic Avenues in Bone Repair

Physical/Tech News

Latest physical/tech headlines.

• Organic Chemistry
• Inorganic Chemistry
• Materials Science
• Civil Engineering
• Nanotechnology
• Energy and the Environment
• Energy Policy
• Renewable Energy
• Energy and Resources
• Ancient Civilizations
• Black Holes
• Space Station
• Wearable Technology
• Neural Interfaces
• Spintronics Research
• Spintronics
• Electronics
• Ecology Research

Matter & Energy

• Speeding Drug Molecule Design
• Electromechanical Material Not 'Clamped' Down
• Charting a Pathway to Next-Gen Biofuels
• Greener Lithium-Ion Batteries Using Iron

Space & Time

• Cosmic Rays Illuminate the Past
• Star Suddenly Vanish from the Night Sky
• Triple-Star System
• Robotic 'SuperLimbs' Could Help Moonwalkers

Computers & Math

• Flexible Film Senses Nearby Movements
• Quantum Computers and Electronics: Thin Crystals
• Modeling Tomorrow's Materials Today
• Statistics and Protection of Endangered Species

Environment News

Latest environment headlines.

• Behavioral Science
• Wild Animals
• Animal Learning and Intelligence
• Endangered Plants
• Agriculture and Food
• Food and Agriculture
• Veterinary Medicine
• Cows, Sheep, Pigs
• Drought Research
• Severe Weather
• Geochemistry
• Oceanography
• Origin of Life
• Early Humans
• Developmental Biology
• Cell Biology

Plants & Animals

• Cooperative Hunting Not Brain-Intensive
• Detecting Antibiotics in Vegetables and Worms
• Roots Are a Key to Drought-Tolerant Maize
• Cuddled Cows: Preference for Women

Earth & Climate

• Drought-Monitoring Outpaced by Climate Changes
• Recycling CO2 Into Household Chemicals
• Microbes and Organic Material On the Seafloor
• Tapping Coal Mines for Rare Elements

Fossils & Ruins

• Legacy of Indigenous Stewardship of Camas
• Prehistoric European Culinary Traditions
• 'Major' Ancient Migration to Timor Island
• Exploring Diversity in Cell Division

Society/Education News

Latest society/education headlines.

• Lung Cancer
• Lung Disease
• Diseases and Conditions
• Biodiversity
• Land Management
• Neuroscience
• Language Acquisition
• Information Technology
• Engineering
• Mathematical Modeling
• Educational Psychology
• K-12 Education
• Industrial Relations
• Energy Issues
• Sustainability
• Educational Policy
• Educational Technology
• Mathematics
• Computer Modeling

Science & Society

• Importance of Lung Cancer Screening
• Biodiversity: Conserving Nature's Strongholds
• Ukraine War Caused Migrating Eagles to Deviate
• Kangaroos: Fearing Human 'Super Predator'

Education & Learning

• How Practice Forms New Memory Pathways
• No Inner Voice Linked to Poorer Verbal Memory
• AI Knowledge Gets Your Foot in the Door
• New Tool for Predicting Neurotransmitters

Business & Industry

• Robot-Phobia and Labor Shortages
• Pulling Power of Renewables
• Can AI Simulate Multidisciplinary Workshops?
• New Sensing Checks Overhaul Manufacturing
• Networks Regulating Gene Function in Human Brain
• Birth of Universe's Earliest Galaxies
• Billions of Orphan Stars Revealed
• Massive Catalog of Strange Worlds

Trending Topics

Strange & offbeat, about this site.

ScienceDaily features breaking news about the latest discoveries in science, health, the environment, technology, and more -- from leading universities, scientific journals, and research organizations.

Visitors can browse more than 500 individual topics, grouped into 12 main sections (listed under the top navigational menu), covering: the medical sciences and health; physical sciences and technology; biological sciences and the environment; and social sciences, business and education. Headlines and summaries of relevant news stories are provided on each topic page.

Stories are posted daily, selected from press materials provided by hundreds of sources from around the world. Links to sources and relevant journal citations (where available) are included at the end of each post.

For more information about ScienceDaily, please consult the links listed at the bottom of each page.

Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles and JavaScript.

• View all journals
• Explore content
• About the journal
• Publish with us
• Sign up for alerts

Research articles

Study of plasmid mediated quinolone resistance genes among escherichia coli and klebsiella pneumoniae isolated from pediatric patients with sepsis.

• Ahmed Gomaa Elsayed
• Ehab M Fahmy
• Mohamed Mofreh Mohamed

Axial compression performance of partially encased concrete columns with web opening

• Jiongfeng Liang
• Yunchen Wang

Unraveling the role of natriuretic peptide clearance receptor (NPR3) in glomerular diseases

• Dina Dabaghie
• Emmanuelle Charrin
• Jaakko Patrakka

Multidrug-resistant Escherichia coli causing canine pyometra and urinary tract infections are genetically related but distinct from those causing prostatic abscesses

• Parinya Sroithongkham
• Naiyaphat Nittayasut
• Pattrarat Chanchaithong

Evolution characteristics and multi-scenario prediction of habitat quality in Yulin City based on PLUS and InVEST models

• Zenglin Hong
• Xiaofeng Liu

Neurodevelopmental delay in children exposed to maternal SARS-CoV-2 in-utero

• Viviana Fajardo-Martinez
• Fatima Ferreira
• Karin Nielsen-Saines

Efficacy and safety of vitamin C supplementation in the treatment of community-acquired pneumonia: a systematic review and meta-analysis with trial sequential analysis

• Yogesh Sharma
• Subodha Sumanadasa
• Campbell Thompson

Prolonged intermittent theta burst stimulation targeting the left prefrontal cortex and cerebellum does not affect executive functions in healthy individuals

• Stevan Nikolin
• Donel M. Martin

Balanced opioid-free anesthesia with lidocaine and esketamine versus balanced anesthesia with sufentanil for gynecological endoscopic surgery: a randomized controlled trial

• Qing-yun Zhang

The vomeronasal organ and incisive duct of harbor seals are modified to secrete acidic mucus into the nasal cavity

• Daisuke Kondoh
• Wataru Tonomori
• Mari Kobayashi

Trends in chlamydia prevalence in the United States, 2005–2016

• Guanghao Zheng

Correlation and risk factors of peripheral and cervicocephalic arterial atherosclerosis in patients with ischemic cerebrovascular disease

• Lu-guang Li

A dual-responsive RhB-doped MOF probe for simultaneous recognition of Cu 2+ and Fe 3+

• Zhijuan Zhang

Seroprevalence of Treponema pallidum infection in Brazilian indigenous people: a cross-sectional study

• Marcelo S. Barbosa
• Júlio Henrique F. S. Queiroz
• Simone Simionatto

Heavy metal poisoning caused by Chinese folk remedies in psoriasis patients: a retrospective analysis

• Changjiang Xue

Convergent accelerated evolution of mammal-specific conserved non-coding elements in hibernators

• Daiki Nakayama
• Takashi Makino

Improved differentiation of cavernous malformation and acute intraparenchymal hemorrhage on CT using an AI algorithm

• Jung Youn Kim
• Hye Jeong Choi
• Hwangseon Ju

The manatee variational autoencoder model for predicting gene expression alterations caused by transcription factor perturbations

• Lucas Seninge
• Hongxu Ding

Association between life’s essential 8 and overactive bladder

• Guoliang Feng
• Shaoqun Huang
• Hongyang Gong

Frequency multiplexing enables parallel multi-sample EPR

• Chun Him Lee
• Jan G. Korvink
• Mazin Jouda

Quick links

• Explore articles by subject
• Guide to authors
• Editorial policies

News alert: UC Berkeley has announced its next university librarian

Secondary menu

• Log in to your Library account
• Hours and Maps
• Connect from Off Campus
• UC Berkeley Home

Search form

Research methods--quantitative, qualitative, and more: overview.

• Quantitative Research
• Qualitative Research
• Data Science Methods (Machine Learning, AI, Big Data)
• Text Mining and Computational Text Analysis
• Evidence Synthesis/Systematic Reviews
• Get Data, Get Help!

About Research Methods

This guide provides an overview of research methods, how to choose and use them, and supports and resources at UC Berkeley. 

As Patten and Newhart note in the book Understanding Research Methods , "Research methods are the building blocks of the scientific enterprise. They are the "how" for building systematic knowledge. The accumulation of knowledge through research is by its nature a collective endeavor. Each well-designed study provides evidence that may support, amend, refute, or deepen the understanding of existing knowledge...Decisions are important throughout the practice of research and are designed to help researchers collect evidence that includes the full spectrum of the phenomenon under study, to maintain logical rules, and to mitigate or account for possible sources of bias. In many ways, learning research methods is learning how to see and make these decisions."

The choice of methods varies by discipline, by the kind of phenomenon being studied and the data being used to study it, by the technology available, and more.  This guide is an introduction, but if you don't see what you need here, always contact your subject librarian, and/or take a look to see if there's a library research guide that will answer your question. 

Suggestions for changes and additions to this guide are welcome! 

START HERE: SAGE Research Methods

Without question, the most comprehensive resource available from the library is SAGE Research Methods.  HERE IS THE ONLINE GUIDE  to this one-stop shopping collection, and some helpful links are below:

• SAGE Research Methods
• Little Green Books  (Quantitative Methods)
• Little Blue Books  (Qualitative Methods)
• Dictionaries and Encyclopedias  
• Case studies of real research projects
• Sample datasets for hands-on practice
• Streaming video--see methods come to life
• Methodspace- -a community for researchers
• SAGE Research Methods Course Mapping

Library Data Services at UC Berkeley

Library Data Services Program and Digital Scholarship Services

The LDSP offers a variety of services and tools !  From this link, check out pages for each of the following topics:  discovering data, managing data, collecting data, GIS data, text data mining, publishing data, digital scholarship, open science, and the Research Data Management Program.

Be sure also to check out the visual guide to where to seek assistance on campus with any research question you may have!

Library GIS Services

Other Data Services at Berkeley

D-Lab Supports Berkeley faculty, staff, and graduate students with research in data intensive social science, including a wide range of training and workshop offerings Dryad Dryad is a simple self-service tool for researchers to use in publishing their datasets. It provides tools for the effective publication of and access to research data. Geospatial Innovation Facility (GIF) Provides leadership and training across a broad array of integrated mapping technologies on campu Research Data Management A UC Berkeley guide and consulting service for research data management issues

General Research Methods Resources

Here are some general resources for assistance:

• Assistance from ICPSR (must create an account to access): Getting Help with Data , and Resources for Students
• Wiley Stats Ref for background information on statistics topics
• Survey Documentation and Analysis (SDA) .  Program for easy web-based analysis of survey data.

Consultants

• D-Lab/Data Science Discovery Consultants Request help with your research project from peer consultants.
• Research data (RDM) consulting Meet with RDM consultants before designing the data security, storage, and sharing aspects of your qualitative project.
• Statistics Department Consulting Services A service in which advanced graduate students, under faculty supervision, are available to consult during specified hours in the Fall and Spring semesters.

Related Resourcex

• IRB / CPHS Qualitative research projects with human subjects often require that you go through an ethics review.
• OURS (Office of Undergraduate Research and Scholarships) OURS supports undergraduates who want to embark on research projects and assistantships. In particular, check out their "Getting Started in Research" workshops
• Sponsored Projects Sponsored projects works with researchers applying for major external grants.
• Next: Quantitative Research >>
• Last Updated: Apr 25, 2024 11:09 AM
• URL: https://guides.lib.berkeley.edu/researchmethods

• Clinical Trials

About Clinical Studies

Research: it's all about patients.

Mayo's mission is about the patient, the patient comes first. So the mission and research here, is to advance how we can best help the patient, how to make sure the patient comes first in care. So in many ways, it's a cycle. It can start with as simple as an idea, worked on in a laboratory, brought to the patient bedside, and if everything goes right, and let's say it's helpful or beneficial, then brought on as a standard approach. And I think that is one of the unique characteristics of Mayo's approach to research, that patient-centeredness. That really helps to put it in its own spotlight.

At Mayo Clinic, the needs of the patient come first. Part of this commitment involves conducting medical research with the goal of helping patients live longer, healthier lives.

Through clinical studies, which involve people who volunteer to participate in them, researchers can better understand how to diagnose, treat and prevent diseases or conditions.

Types of clinical studies

• Observational study. A type of study in which people are observed or certain outcomes are measured. No attempt is made by the researcher to affect the outcome — for example, no treatment is given by the researcher.
• Clinical trial (interventional study). During clinical trials, researchers learn if a new test or treatment works and is safe. Treatments studied in clinical trials might be new drugs or new combinations of drugs, new surgical procedures or devices, or new ways to use existing treatments. Find out more about the five phases of non-cancer clinical trials on ClinicalTrials.gov or the National Cancer Institute phases of cancer trials .
• Medical records research. Medical records research involves the use of information collected from medical records. By studying the medical records of large groups of people over long periods of time, researchers can see how diseases progress and which treatments and surgeries work best. Find out more about Minnesota research authorization .

Clinical studies may differ from standard medical care

A health care provider diagnoses and treats existing illnesses or conditions based on current clinical practice guidelines and available, approved treatments.

But researchers are constantly looking for new and better ways to prevent and treat disease. In their laboratories, they explore ideas and test hypotheses through discovery science. Some of these ideas move into formal clinical trials.

During clinical studies, researchers formally and scientifically gather new knowledge and possibly translate these findings into improved patient care.

Before clinical trials begin

This video demonstrates how discovery science works, what happens in the research lab before clinical studies begin, and how a discovery is transformed into a potential therapy ready to be tested in trials with human participants:

How clinical trials work

Trace the clinical trial journey from a discovery research idea to a viable translatable treatment for patients:

See a glossary of terms related to clinical studies, clinical trials and medical research on ClinicalTrials.gov.

Watch a video about clinical studies to help you prepare to participate.

Let's Talk About Clinical Research

Narrator: This presentation is a brief introduction to the terms, purposes, benefits and risks of clinical research.

If you have questions about the content of this program, talk with your health care provider.

What is clinical research?

Clinical research is a process to find new and better ways to understand, detect, control and treat health conditions. The scientific method is used to find answers to difficult health-related questions.

Ways to participate

There are many ways to participate in clinical research at Mayo Clinic. Three common ways are by volunteering to be in a study, by giving permission to have your medical record reviewed for research purposes, and by allowing your blood or tissue samples to be studied.

Types of clinical research

There are many types of clinical research:

• Prevention studies look at ways to stop diseases from occurring or from recurring after successful treatment.
• Screening studies compare detection methods for common conditions.
• Diagnostic studies test methods for early identification of disease in those with symptoms.
• Treatment studies test new combinations of drugs and new approaches to surgery, radiation therapy and complementary medicine.
• The role of inheritance or genetic studies may be independent or part of other research.
• Quality of life studies explore ways to manage symptoms of chronic illness or side effects of treatment.
• Medical records studies review information from large groups of people.

Clinical research volunteers

Participants in clinical research volunteer to take part. Participants may be healthy, at high risk for developing a disease, or already diagnosed with a disease or illness. When a study is offered, individuals may choose whether or not to participate. If they choose to participate, they may leave the study at any time.

Research terms

You will hear many terms describing clinical research. These include research study, experiment, medical research and clinical trial.

Clinical trial

A clinical trial is research to answer specific questions about new therapies or new ways of using known treatments. Clinical trials take place in phases. For a treatment to become standard, it usually goes through two or three clinical trial phases. The early phases look at treatment safety. Later phases continue to look at safety and also determine the effectiveness of the treatment.

Phase I clinical trial

A small number of people participate in a phase I clinical trial. The goals are to determine safe dosages and methods of treatment delivery. This may be the first time the drug or intervention is used with people.

Phase II clinical trial

Phase II clinical trials have more participants. The goals are to evaluate the effectiveness of the treatment and to monitor side effects. Side effects are monitored in all the phases, but this is a special focus of phase II.

Phase III clinical trial

Phase III clinical trials have the largest number of participants and may take place in multiple health care centers. The goal of a phase III clinical trial is to compare the new treatment to the standard treatment. Sometimes the standard treatment is no treatment.

Phase IV clinical trial

A phase IV clinical trial may be conducted after U.S. Food and Drug Administration approval. The goal is to further assess the long-term safety and effectiveness of a therapy. Smaller numbers of participants may be enrolled if the disease is rare. Larger numbers will be enrolled for common diseases, such as diabetes or heart disease.

Clinical research sponsors

Mayo Clinic funds clinical research at facilities in Rochester, Minnesota; Jacksonville, Florida; and Arizona, and in the Mayo Clinic Health System. Clinical research is conducted in partnership with other medical centers throughout the world. Other sponsors of research at Mayo Clinic include the National Institutes of Health, device or pharmaceutical companies, foundations and organizations.

Clinical research at Mayo Clinic

Dr. Hugh Smith, former chair of Mayo Clinic Board of Governors, stated, "Our commitment to research is based on our knowledge that medicine must be constantly moving forward, that we need to continue our efforts to better understand disease and bring the latest medical knowledge to our practice and to our patients."

This fits with the term "translational research," meaning what is learned in the laboratory goes quickly to the patient's bedside and what is learned at the bedside is taken back to the laboratory.

Ethics and safety of clinical research

All clinical research conducted at Mayo Clinic is reviewed and approved by Mayo's Institutional Review Board. Multiple specialized committees and colleagues may also provide review of the research. Federal rules help ensure that clinical research is conducted in a safe and ethical manner.

Institutional review board

An institutional review board (IRB) reviews all clinical research proposals. The goal is to protect the welfare and safety of human subjects. The IRB continues its review as research is conducted.

Consent process

Participants sign a consent form to ensure that they understand key facts about a study. Such facts include that participation is voluntary and they may withdraw at any time. The consent form is an informational document, not a contract.

Study activities

Staff from the study team describe the research activities during the consent process. The research may include X-rays, blood tests, counseling or medications.

Study design

During the consent process, you may hear different phrases related to study design. Randomized means you will be assigned to a group by chance, much like a flip of a coin. In a single-blinded study, participants do not know which treatment they are receiving. In a double-blinded study, neither the participant nor the research team knows which treatment is being administered.

Some studies use an inactive substance called a placebo.

Multisite studies allow individuals from many different locations or health care centers to participate.

Remuneration

If the consent form states remuneration is provided, you will be paid for your time and participation in the study.

Some studies may involve additional cost. To address costs in a study, carefully review the consent form and discuss questions with the research team and your insurance company. Medicare may cover routine care costs that are part of clinical trials. Medicaid programs in some states may also provide routine care cost coverage, as well.

When considering participation in a research study, carefully look at the benefits and risks. Benefits may include earlier access to new clinical approaches and regular attention from a research team. Research participation often helps others in the future.

Risks/inconveniences

Risks may include side effects. The research treatment may be no better than the standard treatment. More visits, if required in the study, may be inconvenient.

Weigh your risks and benefits

Consider your situation as you weigh the risks and benefits of participation prior to enrolling and during the study. You may stop participation in the study at any time.

Ask questions

Stay informed while participating in research:

• Write down questions you want answered.
• If you do not understand, say so.
• If you have concerns, speak up.

Website resources are available. The first website lists clinical research at Mayo Clinic. The second website, provided by the National Institutes of Health, lists studies occurring in the United States and throughout the world.

Additional information about clinical research may be found at the Mayo Clinic Barbara Woodward Lips Patient Education Center and the Stephen and Barbara Slaggie Family Cancer Education Center.

Clinical studies questions

• Phone: 800-664-4542 (toll-free)
• Contact form

Cancer-related clinical studies questions

• Phone: 855-776-0015 (toll-free)

International patient clinical studies questions

• Phone: 507-284-8884
• Email: [email protected]

Clinical Studies in Depth

Learning all you can about clinical studies helps you prepare to participate.

• Institutional Review Board

The Institutional Review Board protects the rights, privacy, and welfare of participants in research programs conducted by Mayo Clinic and its associated faculty, professional staff, and students.

More about research at Mayo Clinic

• Research Faculty
• Laboratories
• Core Facilities
• Centers & Programs
• Departments & Divisions
• Postdoctoral Fellowships
• Training Grant Programs
• Publications

Mayo Clinic Footer

• Request Appointment
• About Mayo Clinic
• About This Site

Legal Conditions and Terms

• Terms and Conditions
• Privacy Policy
• Notice of Privacy Practices
• Notice of Nondiscrimination
• Manage Cookies

Advertising

Mayo Clinic is a nonprofit organization and proceeds from Web advertising help support our mission. Mayo Clinic does not endorse any of the third party products and services advertised.

• Advertising and sponsorship policy
• Advertising and sponsorship opportunities

Reprint Permissions

A single copy of these materials may be reprinted for noncommercial personal use only. "Mayo," "Mayo Clinic," "MayoClinic.org," "Mayo Clinic Healthy Living," and the triple-shield Mayo Clinic logo are trademarks of Mayo Foundation for Medical Education and Research.

Research Study Types

There are many different types of research studies, and each has distinct strengths and weaknesses. In general, randomized trials and cohort studies provide the best information when looking at the link between a certain factor (like diet) and a health outcome (like heart disease).

Laboratory and Animal Studies

These are studies done in laboratories on cells, tissue, or animals.

• Strengths: Laboratories provide strictly controlled conditions and are often the genesis of scientific ideas that go on to have a broad impact on human health. They can help understand the mechanisms of disease.
• Weaknesses: Laboratory and animal studies are only a starting point. Animals or cells are not a substitute for humans.

Cross-Sectional Surveys

These studies examine the incidence of a certain outcome (disease or other health characteristic) in a specific group of people at one point in time. Surveys are often sent to participants to gather data about the outcome of interest.

• Strengths: Inexpensive and easy to perform.
• Weaknesses: Can only establish an association in that one specific time period.

Case-Control Studies

These studies look at the characteristics of one group of people who already have a certain health outcome (the cases) and compare them with a similar group of people who do not have the outcome (the controls). An example may be looking at a group of people with heart disease and another group without heart disease who are similar in age, sex, and economic status, and comparing their intakes of fruits and vegetables to see if this exposure could be associated with heart disease risk.

• Strengths: Case-control studies can be done quickly and relatively cheaply.
• Weaknesses: Not ideal for studying diet because they gather information from the past, which can be difficult for most people to recall accurately. Furthermore, people with illnesses often recall past behaviors differently from those without illness. This opens such studies to potential inaccuracy and bias in the information they gather.

Cohort Studies

These are observational studies that follow large groups of people over a long period of time, years or even decades, to find associations of an exposure(s) with disease outcomes. Researchers regularly gather information from the people in the study on several variables (like meat intake, physical activity level, and weight). Once a specified amount of time has elapsed, the characteristics of people in the group are compared to test specific hypotheses (such as a link between high versus low intake of carotenoid-rich foods and glaucoma, or high versus low meat intake and prostate cancer).

• Strengths: Participants are not required to change their diets or lifestyle as may be with randomized controlled studies. Study sizes may be larger than other study types. They generally provide more reliable information than case-control studies because they don’t rely on information from the past. Cohort studies gather information from participants at the beginning and throughout the study, long before they may develop the disease being studied. As a group, many of these types of studies have provided valuable information about the link between lifestyle factors and disease.
• Weaknesses: A longer duration of following participants make these studies time-consuming and expensive. Results cannot suggest cause-and-effect, only associations. Evaluation of dietary intake is self-reported.

Two of the largest and longest-running cohort studies of diet are the Harvard-based Nurses’ Health Study and the Health Professionals Follow-up Study.

If you follow nutrition news, chances are you have come across findings from a cohort called the Nurses’ Health Study . The Nurses’ Health Study (NHS) began in 1976, spearheaded by researchers from the Channing Laboratory at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School, and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, with funding from the National Institutes of Health. It gathered registered nurses ages 30-55 years from across the U.S. to respond to a series of questionnaires. Nurses were specifically chosen because of their ability to complete the health-related, often very technical, questionnaires thoroughly and accurately. They showed motivation to participate in the long-term study that required ongoing questionnaires every two years. Furthermore, the group provided blood, urine, and other samples over the course of the study.

The NHS is a prospective cohort study, meaning a group of people who are followed forward in time to examine lifestyle habits or other characteristics to see if they develop a disease, death, or some other indicated outcome. In comparison, a retrospective cohort study would specify a disease or outcome and look back in time at the group to see if there were common factors leading to the disease or outcome. A benefit of prospective studies over retrospective studies is greater accuracy in reporting details, such as food intake, that is not distorted by the diagnosis of illness.

To date, there are three NHS cohorts: NHS original cohort, NHS II, and NHS 3. Below are some features unique to each cohort.

NHS – Original Cohort

• Started in 1976 by Frank Speizer, M.D.
• Participants: 121,700 married women, ages 30 to 55 in 1976.
• Outcomes studied: Impact of contraceptive methods and smoking on breast cancer; later this was expanded to observe other lifestyle factors and behaviors in relation to 30 diseases.
• A food frequency questionnaire was added in 1980 to collect information on dietary intake, and continues to be collected every four years.
• Started in 1989 by Walter Willett, M.D., M.P.H., Dr.P.H., and colleagues.
• Participants: 116,430 single and married women, ages 25 to 42 in 1989.
• Outcomes studied: Impact on women’s health of oral contraceptives initiated during adolescence, diet and physical activity in adolescence, and lifestyle risk factors in a younger population than the NHS Original Cohort. The wide range of diseases examined in the original NHS is now also being studied in NHSII.
• The first food frequency questionnaire was collected in 1991, and is collected every four years.
• Started in 2010 by Jorge Chavarro, M.D., Sc.M., Sc.D, Walter Willett, M.D., M.P.H., Dr.P.H., Janet Rich-Edwards, Sc.D., M.P.H, and Stacey Missmer, Sc.D.
• Participants: Expanded to include not just registered nurses but licensed practical nurses (LPN) and licensed vocational nurses (LVN), ages 19 to 46. Enrollment is currently open.
• Inclusion of more diverse population of nurses, including male nurses and nurses from Canada.
• Outcomes studied: Dietary patterns, lifestyle, environment, and nursing occupational exposures that may impact men’s and women’s health; the impact of new hormone preparations and fertility/pregnancy on women’s health; relationship of diet in adolescence on breast cancer risk.

From these three cohorts, extensive research has been published regarding the association of diet, smoking, physical activity levels, overweight and obesity, oral contraceptive use, hormone therapy, endogenous hormones, dietary factors, sleep, genetics, and other behaviors and characteristics with various diseases. In 2016, in celebration of the 40 th  Anniversary of NHS, the  American Journal of Public Health’s  September issue  was dedicated to featuring the many contributions of the Nurses’ Health Studies to public health.

Growing Up Today Study (GUTS)

In 1996, recruitment began for a new cross-generational cohort called  GUTS (Growing Up Today Study) —children of nurses from the NHS II. GUTS is composed of 27,802 girls and boys who were between the ages of 9 and 17 at the time of enrollment. As the entire cohort has entered adulthood, they complete annual questionnaires including information on dietary intake, weight changes, exercise level, substance and alcohol use, body image, and environmental factors. Researchers are looking at conditions more common in young adults such as asthma, skin cancer, eating disorders, and sports injuries.

Randomized Trials

Like cohort studies, these studies follow a group of people over time. However, with randomized trials, the researchers intervene with a specific behavior change or treatment (such as following a specific diet or taking a supplement) to see how it affects a health outcome. They are called “randomized trials” because people in the study are randomly assigned to either receive or not receive the intervention. This randomization helps researchers determine the true effect the intervention has on the health outcome. Those who do not receive the intervention or labelled the “control group,” which means these participants do not change their behavior, or if the study is examining the effects of a vitamin supplement, the control group participants receive a placebo supplement that contains no active ingredients.

• Strengths: Considered the “gold standard” and best for determining the effectiveness of an intervention (e.g., dietary pattern, supplement) on an endpoint such as cancer or heart disease. Conducted in a highly controlled setting with limited variables that could affect the outcome. They determine cause-and-effect relationships.
• Weaknesses: High cost, potentially low long-term compliance with prescribed diets, and possible ethical issues. Due to expense, the study size may be small.

Meta-Analyses and Systematic Reviews

A meta-analysis collects data from several previous studies on one topic to analyze and combine the results using statistical methods to provide a summary conclusion. Meta-analyses are usually conducted using randomized controlled trials and cohort studies that have higher quality of evidence than other designs. A systematic review also examines past literature related to a specific topic and design, analyzing the quality of studies and results but may not pool the data. Sometimes a systematic review is followed by conducting a meta-analysis if the quality of the studies is good and the data can be combined.

• Strengths: Inexpensive and provides a general comprehensive summary of existing research on a topic. This can create an explanation or assumption to be used for further investigation.
• Weaknesses: Prone to selection bias, as the authors can choose or exclude certain studies, which can change the resulting outcome. Combining data that includes lower-quality studies can also skew the results.

A primer on systematic review and meta-analysis in diabetes research

Terms of use.

The contents of this website are for educational purposes and are not intended to offer personal medical advice. You should seek the advice of your physician or other qualified health provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition. Never disregard professional medical advice or delay in seeking it because of something you have read on this website. The Nutrition Source does not recommend or endorse any products.

Pembrolizumab Provides First-Ever Overall Survival Improvement in Kidney Cancer

May 21, 2024 , by Carmen Phillips

Some people with kidney cancer that can be removed via surgery are at high risk of it coming back, including those whose cancer has spread to nearby lymph nodes. 

The immunotherapy drug pembrolizumab (Keytruda) has rapidly become one of the most widely used cancer treatments. Based on updated results from a large clinical trial , the drug is now part of an important milestone in the treatment of kidney cancer—specifically, clear-cell renal cell carcinoma , the most common form of the disease. 

All participants in the trial had earlier-stage kidney cancer and their tumors could be removed with surgery, but they were also at increased risk of their cancer coming back, or recurring. So after undergoing surgery, they were randomly assigned to get pembrolizumab for up to a year or a placebo and routine monitoring . 

At 4 years after starting the post-surgical treatment, about 91% of people given pembrolizumab were still alive , compared with 86% of those who received a placebo, according to results published April 17 in the New England Journal of Medicine . Overall, people who received pembrolizumab had a nearly 40% reduced risk of dying during that period.

The findings mark the first time a post-surgical, or adjuvant, treatment for kidney cancer has been shown to help people live longer. 

Based on earlier results from this trial, called KEYNOTE-564, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved pembrolizumab in 2021 as an adjuvant treatment for kidney cancer . At the time of the approval, the trial had only gone on long enough to show an improvement in how long people lived without their cancer returning.

But even with the approval, many oncologists haven’t been using pembrolizumab routinely as an adjuvant treatment in their higher-risk patients, explained Martin Voss, M.D., and Robert Motzer, M.D., of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, in an editorial that accompanied the updated findings .

Instead, they’ve been waiting to find out whether the treatment improves how long people live overall, Drs. Voss and Mosser wrote. With that question now answered, they continued, “the anticipated effect” on the everyday care of patients “cannot be overstated.”

Some experts, however, anticipate a measured change in treatment. “It’s not going to be a total paradigm shift,” said Mark Ball, M.D., of NCI’s Center for Cancer Research , who specializes in treating kidney cancer.

In part, that’s because the updated findings also show that many patients appear to do very well with surgery alone, Dr. Ball said. Giving all patients who meet the approval criteria an expensive drug that can have serious side effects, he continued, would clearly be “ overtreatment .”

So from a research perspective, he said, the next steps are clear: “We have to get smarter about identifying who is at the highest risk of recurrence.” 

Looking for answers to the overall survival question

Many people with earlier-stage kidney cancer are cured with surgery. But the cancer will return in up to 50% of people, most often those whose cancer has certain high-risk characteristics. Those characteristics include the presence of cancer in the lymph nodes nearest to the tumor or having tumor cells with what are called sarcomatoid features.

Adjuvant therapy is used in many early-stage cancers that can be treated with surgery. It serves as an insurance policy of sorts, reducing the chances of the cancer coming back by killing any cancer cells missed by surgery or that had already escaped from the tumor before surgery.

Form of Radiation Effective for Some People with Kidney Cancer

Called SBRT, the treatment stopped tumors from growing, keeping them in check for 5 years.

Until now, only a single adjuvant therapy for kidney cancer has been available: the targeted therapy sunitinib (Sutent) , which was approved by FDA for this use in 2017.

That approval was based on one clinical trial in which adjuvant sunitinib improved disease-free survival . But the improvement came with severe side effects, and there’s no evidence that the treatment helps people live longer, Dr. Ball explained. 

As a result, Dr. Ball said, “sunitinib is really never prescribed” for this use.

In the absence of an adjuvant therapy that’s proven to help people with earlier-stage kidney cancer live longer, many patients only get routine monitoring, or surveillance , afterward. 

So oncologists have been especially eager to see if, with more time having passed, the promising recurrence-free survival with pembrolizumab in the KEYNOTE-564 trial translated into longer overall survival.

Improved survival at 2, 3, and 4 years

Nearly 1,000 people participated in KEYNOTE-564, which was funded by Merck, pembrolizumab’s manufacturer. All were at increased risk of their cancer coming back after surgery. Participants assigned to pembrolizumab took the drug every 3 weeks for up to 1 year.

More people in the pembrolizumab group were alive at every time point measured in the study, not just at the 4-year mark.

People in the pembrolizumab group also continued to live longer without their cancer returning. At 4 years, 65% of people in the pembrolizumab group had not had a recurrence, compared with 57% in the placebo group.

The findings represent “a clinically meaningful survival improvement,” said the trial’s lead investigator, Toni Choueiri, M.D., of Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, during a presentation of the results at the 2024 ASCO Genitourinary Cancer Symposium in January.

As was expected, Dr. Choueiri noted, more people in the pembrolizumab group had treatment-related side effects, including those like fatigue and rash that are commonly seen in people treated with the drug. 

Overall, about 20% of people in the pembrolizumab group had serious side effects, and 21% stopped treatment early because of side effects (as did 2% of those in the placebo group). 

A major shift in treating early-stage kidney cancer?

More people with early-stage RCC should now get pembrolizumab after surgery, said Pedro Barata, M.D., of the Seidman Cancer Center in Cleveland, who specializes in treating kidney cancer, at the ASCO Genitourinary Cancer Symposium.

Dr. Barata said he generally recommends adjuvant therapy with pembrolizumab to his patients at a particularly elevated risk of the cancer returning, which he assesses using a recurrence risk model for kidney cancer .

Most patients will only have mild side effects from the treatment, he continued. But “some patients will have significant side effects,” and the treatments used to manage those side effects have their own side effects.

So oncologists need to discuss the potential improvements in survival versus the impact of potential side effects, Dr. Barata continued.

“We [must] take into consideration quality of life , patient preferences, and even availability of the drug in some circumstances,” he said. “However, I would argue that [now] the scales favor adjuvant pembrolizumab.”

Dr. Ball agreed. Unlike with some other cancers for which pembrolizumab is a standard treatment , however, there are no tumor or blood markers ( biomarkers ) that single out patients whose cancer is most likely to respond to the drug.

So for the time being, he continued, oncologists should rely on well-established risk factors to guide their decision making and treatment recommendations to their patients. 

Featured Posts

March 27, 2024, by Edward Winstead

March 21, 2024, by Elia Ben-Ari

March 5, 2024, by Carmen Phillips

• Biology of Cancer
• Cancer Risk
• Childhood Cancer
• Clinical Trial Results
• Disparities
• FDA Approvals
• Global Health
• Leadership & Expert Views
• Screening & Early Detection
• Survivorship & Supportive Care
• February (6)
• January (6)
• December (7)
• November (6)
• October (7)
• September (7)
• February (7)
• November (7)
• October (5)
• September (6)
• November (4)
• September (9)
• February (5)
• October (8)
• January (7)
• December (6)
• September (8)
• February (9)
• December (9)
• November (9)
• October (9)
• September (11)
• February (11)
• January (10)

9 Undergraduate Research Projects That Wowed Us This Year

The telegraph. The polio vaccine. The bar code. Light beer. Throughout its history, NYU has been known for innovation, with faculty and alumni in every generation contributing to some of the most notable inventions and scientific breakthroughs of their time. But you don’t wind up in the history books—or peer-reviewed journals—by accident; academic research, like any specialized discipline, takes hard work and lots of practice. 

And at NYU, for students who are interested, that training can start early—including during an undergraduate's first years on campus. Whether through assistantships in faculty labs, summer internships, senior capstones, or independent projects inspired by coursework, undergrad students have many opportunities to take what they’re learning in the classroom and apply it to create original scholarship throughout their time at NYU. Many present their work at research conferences, and some even co-author work with faculty and graduate students that leads to publication. 

As 2023-2024 drew to a close, the NYU News team coordinated with the Office of the Provost to pull together a snapshot of the research efforts that students undertook during this school year. The nine featured here represent just a small fraction of the impressive work we encountered in fields ranging from biology, chemistry, and engineering to the social sciences, humanities, and the arts. 

These projects were presented at NYU research conferences for undergrads, including Migration and Im/Mobility , Pathways for Discovery: Undergraduate Research and Writing Symposium , Social Impact: NYU’s Applied Undergraduate Research Conference , Arts-Based Undergraduate Research Conference , Gallatin Student Research Conference ,  Dreammaker’s Summit , Tandon’s Research Excellence Exhibit , and Global Engagement Symposium . Learn more about these undergrad research opportunities and others.

Jordan Janowski (CAS '24)

Sade Chaffatt (NYU Abu Dhabi '24)

Elsa Nyongesa (GPH, CAS ’24 )

Anthony Offiah (Gallatin ’26)

Kimberly Sinchi (Tandon ’24) and Sarah Moughal (Tandon ’25)

Rohan Bajaj (Stern '24)

Lizette Saucedo (Liberal Studies ’24)

Eva Fuentes (CAS '24)

Andrea Durham (Tandon ’26)

Jordan Janowski (CAS ’24) Major: Biochemistry Thesis title: “Engineering Chirality for Functionality in Crystalline DNA”

Jordan Janowski (CAS '24). Photo by Tracey Friedman

I work in the Structural DNA Nanotechnology Lab, which was founded by the late NYU professor Ned Seeman, who is known as the father of the field. My current projects are manipulating DNA sequences to self-assemble into high order structures.

Essentially, we’re using DNA as a building material, instead of just analyzing it for its biological functions. It constantly amazes me that this is possible.

I came in as a pre-med student, but when I started working in the lab I realized that I was really interested in continuing my research there. I co-wrote a paper with postdoc Dr. Simon Vecchioni who has been a mentor to me and helped me navigate applying to grad school. I’m headed to Scripps Research in the fall. This research experience has led me to explore some of the molecules that make up life and how they could be engineered into truly unnatural curiosities and technologies.

My PI, Prof. Yoel Ohayon , has been super supportive of my place on the  NYU women’s basketball team, which I’m a  member of. He’s been coming to my games since sophomore year, and he’ll text me with the score and “great game!”— it’s been so nice to have that support for my interests beyond the lab.

Anthony Offiah (Gallatin ’26) Concentration: Fashion design and business administration MLK Scholars research project title: “project: DREAMER”

Anthony Offiah (Gallatin '26). Photo by Tracey Friedman

In “project: DREAMER,” I explored how much a person’s sense of fashion is a result of their environment or societal pressures based on their identity. Certain groups are pressured or engineered to present a certain way, and I wanted to see how much of the opposing force—their character, their personality—affected their sense of style. 

This was a summer research project through the MLK Scholars Program . I did ethnographic interviews with a few people, and asked them to co-design their ideal garments with me. They told me who they are, how they identify, and what they like in fashion, and we synthesized that into their dream garments. And then we had a photo shoot where they were empowered to make artistic choices. 

Some people told me they had a hard time conveying their sense of style because they were apprehensive about being the center of attention or of being dissimilar to the people around them. So they chose to conform to protect themselves. And then others spoke about wanting to safeguard the artistic or vulnerable—or one person used the word “feminine”—side of them so they consciously didn’t dress how they ideally would. 

We ended the interviews by stating an objective about how this co-designing process didn’t end with them just getting new clothes—it was about approaching fashion differently than how they started and unlearning how society might put them in a certain box without their approval.  

My concentration in Gallatin is fashion design and business administration. In the industry some clothing is critiqued and some clothing is praised—and navigating that is challenging, because what you like might not be well received. So doing bespoke fashion for just one person is freeing in a sense because you don’t have to worry about all that extra stuff. It’s just the art. And I like being an artist first and thinking about the business second.

Lizette Saucedo (Global Liberal Studies ’24) Major: Politics, rights, and development Thesis title: “Acknowledging and Remembering Deceased Migrants Crossing the U.S.-Mexican Border”

Lizette Saucedo (Global Liberal Studies '24). Photo by Tracey Friedman

My thesis project is on commemorating migrants who are dying on their journey north to cross the U.S.–Mexican border. I look at it through different theoretical lenses, and one of the terms is necropolitics—how politics shapes the way the State governs life and especially death. And then of the main issues aside from the deaths is that a lot of people in the U.S. don’t know about them, due to the government trying to eschew responsibility for migrant suffering. In the final portion of the thesis, I argue for presenting what some researchers call “migrant artifacts”—the personal belongings left behind by people trying to cross over—to the public, so that people can become aware and have more of a human understanding of what’s going on. 

This is my senior thesis for Liberal Studies, but the idea for it started in an International Human Rights course I took with professor Joyce Apsel . We read a book by Jason De León called The Land of the Open Graves , which I kept in the back of my mind. And then when I studied abroad in Germany during my junior year, I noticed all the different memorials and museums, and wondered why we didn’t have the equivalent in the U.S. My family comes from Mexico—my parents migrated—and ultimately all of these interests came together.

I came into NYU through the Liberal Studies program and I loved it. It’s transdisciplinary, which shaped how I view my studies. My major is politics, rights, and development and my minor is social work, but I’ve also studied museum studies, and I’ve always loved the arts. The experience of getting to work one-on-one on this thesis has really fortified my belief that I can combine all those things.

Sade Chaffatt (Abu Dhabi ’24) Major: Biology Thesis title: “The Polycomb repressive component, EED in mouse hepatocytes regulates liver homeostasis and survival following partial hepatectomy.”

Sade Chaffatt (NYU Abu Dhabi '24). Photo courtesy of NYUAD

Imagine your liver as a room. Within the liver there are epigenetic mechanisms that control gene expression. Imagine these epigenetic mechanisms as a dimmer switch, so that you could adjust the light in the room. If we remove a protein that is involved in regulating these mechanisms, there might be dysregulation—as though the light is too bright or too dim. One such protein, EED, plays a crucial role in regulating gene expression. And so my project focuses on investigating whether EED is required in mouse hepatocytes to regulate liver homeostasis and to regulate survival following surgical resection.

Stepping into the field of research is very intimidating when you’re an undergraduate student and know nothing. But my capstone mentor, Dr. Kirsten Sadler , encourages students to present their data at lab meetings and to speak with scientists. Even though this is nerve-wracking, it helps to promote your confidence in communicating science to others in the field.

If you’d asked 16-year-old me, I never would’ve imagined that I’d be doing research at this point. Representation matters a lot, and you often don't see women—especially not Black women—in research. Being at NYUAD has really allowed me to see more women in these spaces. Having had some experience in the medical field through internships, I can now say I’m more interested in research and hope to pursue a PhD in the future.

Kimberly Sinchi (Tandon ’24) Major: Computer Science Sarah Moughal (Tandon ’25) Major: Computer Science Project: Robotic Design Team's TITAN

Sarah Moughal (Tandon '25, left) and Kimberly Sinchi (Tandon '24). Photo by Tracey Friedman

Kimberly: The Robotic Design Team has been active at NYU for at least five years. We’re 60-plus undergrad and grad students majoring in electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, computer science, and integrated design. We’ve named our current project TITAN because of how huge it is. TITAN stands for “Tandon’s innovation in terraforming and autonomous navigation.”

Sarah: We compete in NASA’s lunatics competition every year, which means we build a robot from scratch to be able to compete in lunar excavation and construction. We make pretty much everything in house in the Tandon MakerSpace, and everyone gets a little experience with machining, even if you're not mechanical. A lot of it is about learning how to work with other people—communicating across majors and disciplines and learning how to explain our needs to someone who may not be as well versed in particular technologies as we are. 

Kimberly: With NYU’s Vertically Integrated Project I’ve been able to take what I was interested in and actually have a real world impact with it. NASA takes notes on every Rover that enters this competition. What worked and what didn’t actually influences their designs for rovers they send to the moon and to Mars.

Eva Fuentes (CAS ’24) Major: Anthropology Thesis title: “Examining the relationship between pelvic shape and numbers of lumbar vertebrae in primates”

Eva Fuentes (CAS '24). Photo by Tracey Friedman

I came into NYU thinking I wanted to be an art history major with maybe an archeology minor. To do the archeology minor, you have to take the core classes in anthropology, and so I had to take an intro to human evolution course. I was like, this is the coolest thing I’ve learned—ever. So I emailed people in the department to see if I could get involved. 

Since my sophomore year, I’ve been working in the Evolutionary Morphology Lab with Scott Williams, who is primarily interested in the vertebral column of primates in the fossil record because of how it can inform the evolution of posture and locomotion in humans.

For my senior thesis, I’m looking at the number of lumbar vertebrae—the vertebrae that are in the lower back specifically—and aspects of pelvic shape to see if it is possible to make inferences about the number of lumbar vertebrae a fossil may have had. The bones of the lower back are important because they tell us about posture and locomotion.

I committed to a PhD program at Washington University in St. Louis a few weeks ago to study biological anthropology. I never anticipated being super immersed in the academic world. I don’t come from an academic family. I had no idea what I was doing when I started, but Scott Williams, and everyone in the lab, is extremely welcoming and easy to talk to. It wasn't intimidating to come into this lab at all.

Elsa Nyongesa (GPH, CAS ’24 ) Major: Global Public Health and Biology Project: “Diversity in Breast Oncological Studies: Impacts on Black Women’s Health Outcomes”

Elsa Nyongesa (GPH, CAS '24). Photo by Tracey Friedman

I interned at Weill Cornell Medicine through their Travelers Summer Research Fellowship Program where I worked with my mentor, Dr. Lisa Newman, who is the head of the International Center for the Study of Breast Cancer Subtypes. I analyzed data on the frequency of different types of breast cancer across racial and ethnic groups in New York. At the same time, I was also working with Dr. Rachel Kowolsky to study minority underrepresentation in clinical research. 

In an experiential learning course taught by Professor Joyce Moon Howard in the GPH department, I created a research question based on my internship experience. I thought about how I could combine my experiences from the program which led to my exploration of the correlation between minority underrepresentation in breast oncological studies, and how it affects the health outcomes of Black women with breast cancer.

In my major, we learn about the large scope of health disparities across different groups. This opportunity allowed me to learn more about these disparities in the context of breast cancer research. As a premedical student, this experience broadened my perspective on health. I learned more about the social, economic, and environmental factors influencing health outcomes. It also encouraged me to examine literature more critically to find gaps in knowledge and to think about potential solutions to health problems. Overall, this experience deepened my philosophy of service, emphasizing the importance of health equity and advocacy at the research and clinical level.

Rohan Bajaj (Stern ’24) Major: Finance and statistics Thesis title: “Measuring Socioeconomic Changes and Investor Attitude in Chicago’s Post-Covid Economic Recovery”

Rohan Bajaj (Stern '24). Photo by Tracey Friedman

My thesis is focused on understanding the effects of community-proposed infrastructure on both the socioeconomic demographics of cities and on fiscal health. I’m originally from Chicago, so it made a lot of sense to pay tribute back to the place that raised me. I’m compiling a list of characteristics of infrastructure that has been developed since 2021 as a part of the Chicago Recovery Plan and then assessing how neighborhoods have changed geographically and economically. 

I’m looking at municipal bond yields in Chicago as a way of evaluating the fiscal health of the city. Turns out a lot of community-proposed infrastructure is focused in lower income areas within Chicago rather than higher income areas. So that makes the research question interesting, to see if there’s a correlation between the proposed and developed infrastructure projects, and if these neighborhoods are being gentrified alongside development.

I kind of stumbled into the impact investing industry accidentally from an internship I had during my time at NYU. I started working at a renewable energies brokerage in midtown, where my main job was collecting a lot of market research trends and delivering insights on how these different energy markets would come into play. I then worked with the New York State Insurance Fund, where I helped construct and execute their sustainable investment strategy from the ground up. 

I also took a class called “Design with Climate Change” with Peter Anker in Gallatin during my junior year, and a lot of that class was focused on how to have climate resilient and publicly developed infrastructure, and understanding the effects it has on society. It made me start thinking about the vital role that physical surroundings play in steering communities.

In the short term I want to continue diving into impact-focused investing and help identify urban planners and city government to develop their communities responsibly and effectively.

Andrea Durham (Tandon, ’26)  Major: Biomolecular science Research essay title: “The Rise and Fall of Aduhelm”

Andrea Durham (Tandon '26). Photo by Tracey Friedman

This is an essay I wrote last year in an advanced college essay writing class with Professor Lorraine Doran on the approval of a drug for Alzheimer’s disease called Aduhelm—a monoclonal antibody therapy developed by Biogen in 2021, which was described as being momentous and groundbreaking. But there were irregularities ranging from the design of its clinical trials to government involvement that led to the resignation of three scientists on an advisory panel, because not everybody in the scientific community agreed that it should be approved.

When I was six years old, my grandmother was diagnosed. Seeing the impact that it had over the years broke my heart and ignited a passion in me to pursue research. 

When I started at NYU, I wasn’t really sure what I was going to do in the future, or what opportunities I would go after. This writing class really gave me an opportunity to reflect on the things that were important to me in my life. The September after I wrote this paper, I started volunteering in a lab at Mount Sinai for Alzheimer's disease research, and that’s what I’m doing now—working as a volunteer at the Center for Molecular Integrative Neuroresilience under Dr. Giulio Pasinetti. I have this opportunity to be at the forefront, and because of the work I did in my writing class I feel prepared going into these settings with an understanding of the importance of conducting ethical research and working with integrity.

• Department of Health and Human Services
• National Institutes of Health

COVID-19 Research Studies

More information, about clinical center, clinical trials and you, participate in a study, referring a patient, about clinical research.

Research participants are partners in discovery at the NIH Clinical Center, the largest research hospital in America. Clinical research is medical research involving people The Clinical Center provides hope through pioneering clinical research to improve human health. We rapidly translate scientific observations and laboratory discoveries into new ways to diagnose, treat and prevent disease. More than 500,000 people from around the world have participated in clinical research since the hospital opened in 1953. We do not charge patients for participation and treatment in clinical studies at NIH. In certain emergency circumstances, you may qualify for help with travel and other expenses Read more , to see if clinical studies are for you.

Medical Information Disclaimer

Emailed inquires/requests.

Email sent to the National Institutes of Health Clinical Center may be forwarded to appropriate NIH or outside experts for response. We do not collect your name and e-mail address for any purpose other than to respond to your query. Nevertheless, email is not necessarily secure against interception. This statement applies to NIH Clinical Center Studies website. For additional inquiries regarding studies at the National Institutes of Health, please call the Office of Patient Recruitment at 1-800-411-1222

Find NIH Clinical Center Trials

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) Clinical Center Search the Studies site is a registry of publicly supported clinical studies conducted mostly in Bethesda, MD.

2024 Best Doctoral Dissertation Advances Geotechnical Earthquake Engineering, Seismic Design

• by Molly Bechtel
• May 21, 2024

Sumeet Kumar Sinha is this year's recipient of the University of California, Davis, College of Engineering Zuhair A. Munir Award for Best Doctoral Dissertation. The award recognizes the methods, findings and significance of Sinha's research, which featured several first-of-its-kind approaches and analyses in the field of geotechnical earthquake engineering and is actively informing seismic design practices.   

The college established the annual award in 1999 in honor of Zuhair A. Munir, the former dean of engineering who led the college from 2000 to 2002 and acted as associate dean for graduate studies for 20 years. The award recognizes a doctoral student, their exemplary research and the mentorship of their major professor.  

A two-time Aggie alum, Sinha received his master's degree in 2017 and Ph.D. in 2022 from the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, where he was mentored by Associate Professor Katerina Ziotopoulou and Professor Emeritus Bruce Kutter . He is now an assistant professor in the Department of Civil Engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi and co-founder of BrahmaSens, a startup that specializes in the development of sensing technologies and solutions for application in various sectors including health-monitoring of civil infrastructures.  

"It's really a special honor to get this [award]," said Sinha. "It acknowledges both the depth and significance of the research I conducted during my Ph.D."   

Sinha's dissertation is of notable significance in California, where agencies like the Department of Transportation, or Caltrans, which funded his research, are eager to identify improved design methods in seismically active regions of the state.  

In " Liquefaction-Induced Downdrag on Piles: Centrifuge and Numerical Modeling, and Design Procedures ," Sinha focuses on the effects of earthquakes on deep foundations, like piles, in soils that can liquefy. Liquefaction occurs when wet sand-like soils lose their strength due to increased pore water pressure during earthquake shaking. This causes the soil to behave like a liquid, leading to significant ground deformations.   

After the shaking stops, the soil slowly regains its strength as the water drains out, but this settling and densifying process, called reconsolidation, can drag down piles downward. Additional downdrag loads have not always been properly accounted for in conventional design.   

Through centrifuge model tests at the UC Davis Center for Geotechnical Modeling , Sinha developed numerical models to evaluate scenarios. His findings include procedures for accurately estimating downdrag loads and the corresponding demands on pile foundations, as well as practical methods to design bridges in a more efficient and economical way.  

"Dr. Sinha's methods, approaches, documentation, results and overall findings have been, by any standards, novel and meticulous," said Ziotopoulou in her nomination letter. "His research represents a significant and original contribution to the field of geotechnical earthquake engineering, and his findings have already been implemented into practice by major design firms."  

Sinha's research was recognized with a DesignSafe Dataset Award , an Editor's Choice in his field's top journal and the Michael Condon Scholarship from the Deep Foundations Institute. He has published seven papers in peer-reviewed journals.  

Of perhaps greater meaning to Sinha is making improvements in the design codes to make them more informed, feasible, economical, resilient and sustainable through the complete understanding of the mechanism obtained through his findings from experiments, developed numerical models and design procedures, which are available publicly via platforms such as GitHub and DesignSafe.   

"My philosophy has always been to convert whatever I'm doing into a product, a tool which has a wider impact," explained Sinha. "During my Ph.D., I tried to go beyond the deliverables so that I maximize the impact of [my research]."  

Sinha is grateful for his mentors' and peers' influence and support during the five-year Ph.D. program at UC Davis.  

"I have learned a lot from [Professors Katerina Ziotopoulou and Bruce Kutter] academically as well as professionally," said Sinha. "The Geotechnical Graduate Student Society also had a very important role in my overall experience at UC Davis."  

Primary Category

How NASA Tracked the Most Intense Solar Storm in Decades

May 2024 has already proven to be a particularly stormy month for our Sun. During the first full week of May, a barrage of large solar flares and coronal mass ejections (CMEs) launched clouds of charged particles and magnetic fields toward Earth, creating the strongest solar storm to reach Earth in two decades — and possibly one of the strongest displays of auroras on record in the past 500 years.

We’ll be studying this event for years. It will help us test the limits of our models and understanding of solar storms.

Teresa Nieves-Chinchilla

Acting Director of NASA’s Moon to Mars (M2M) Space Weather Analysis Office

“We’ll be studying this event for years,” said Teresa Nieves-Chinchilla, acting director of NASA’s Moon to Mars (M2M) Space Weather Analysis Office. “It will help us test the limits of our models and understanding of solar storms.”

The first signs of the solar storm started late on May 7 with two strong solar flares. From May 7 – 11, multiple strong solar flares and at least seven CMEs stormed toward Earth. Eight of the flares in this period were the most powerful type, known as X-class, with the strongest peaking with a rating of X5.8. (Since then, the same solar region has released many more large flares, including an X8.7 flare — the most powerful flare seen this solar cycle — on May 14.)

Traveling at speeds up to 3 million mph, the CMEs bunched up in waves that reached Earth starting May 10, creating a long-lasting geomagnetic storm that reached a rating of G5 — the highest level on the geomagnetic storm scale, and one that hasn’t been seen since 2003.

“The CMEs all arrived largely at once, and the conditions were just right to create a really historic storm,” said Elizabeth MacDonald, NASA heliophysics citizen science lead and a space scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

When the storm reached Earth, it created brilliant auroras seen around the globe. Auroras were even visible at unusually low latitudes, including the southern U.S. and northern India. The strongest auroras were seen the night of May 10, and they continued to illuminate night skies throughout the weekend. Thousands of reports submitted to the NASA-funded Aurorasaurus citizen science site are helping scientists study the event to learn more about auroras.

“Cameras — even standard cell phone cameras — are much more sensitive to the colors of the aurora than they were in the past,” MacDonald said. “By collecting photos from around the world, we have a huge opportunity to learn more about auroras through citizen science.”

By one measure of geomagnetic storm strength, called the disturbance storm time index which dates back to 1957, this storm was similar to historic storms in 1958 and 2003. And with reports of auroras visible to as low as 26 degrees magnetic latitude, this recent storm may compete with some of the lowest-latitude aurora sightings on record over the past five centuries, though scientists are still assessing this ranking.

“It’s a little hard to gauge storms over time because our technology is always changing,” said Delores Knipp, a research professor in the Smead Aerospace Engineering Science Department and a senior research associate at the NCAR High Altitude Observatory, in Boulder, Colorado. “Aurora visibility is not the perfect measure, but it allows us to compare over centuries.”

MacDonald encourages people to continue submitting aurora reports to Aurorasaurus.org , noting that even non-sightings are valuable for helping scientists understand the extent of the event.

Leading up to the storm, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Space Weather Prediction Center, which is responsible for forecasting solar storm impacts, sent notifications to operators of power grids and commercial satellites to help them mitigate potential impacts.

Warnings helped many NASA missions brace for the storm, with some spacecraft preemptively powering down certain instruments or systems to avoid issues. NASA's ICESat-2 — which studies polar ice sheets — entered safe mode, likely because of increased drag due to the storm.  

Looking Forward

Better data on how solar events influence Earth's upper atmosphere is crucial to understanding space weather's impact on satellites, crewed missions, and Earth- and space-based infrastructure. To date, only a few limited direct measurements exist in this region. But more are coming. Future missions, such as NASA’s Geospace Dynamics Constellation (GDC) and Dynamical Neutral Atmosphere-Ionosphere Coupling (DYNAMIC), will be able to see and measure exactly how Earth’s atmosphere responds to the energy influxes that occur during solar storms like this one. Such measurements will also be valuable as NASA sends astronauts to the Moon with the Artemis missions and, later, to Mars.

The solar region responsible for the recent stormy weather is now turning around the backside of the Sun, where its impacts can’t reach Earth. However, that doesn’t mean the storm is over. NASA’s Solar TErrestrial RElations Observatory (STEREO), currently located at about 12 degrees ahead of Earth in its orbit, will continue watching the active region an additional day after it is no longer visible from Earth.

“The active region is just starting to come into view of Mars,” said Jamie Favors, director for the NASA Space Weather Program at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “We’re already starting to capture some data at Mars, so this story only continues.”

By Mara Johnson-Groh NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.

Media Contact: Sarah Frazier NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.

Related Terms

• Citizen Science
• Goddard Space Flight Center
• Heliophysics
• Heliophysics Division
• ICESat-2 (Ice, Cloud and land Elevation Satellite-2)
• Science & Research
• Science Mission Directorate
• Skywatching
• Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO)
• Solar Flares
• Space Weather
• STEREO (Solar TErrestrial RElations Observatory)
• The Solar System
• The Sun & Solar Physics
• Thermosphere

Explore More

NASA’s TESS Finds Intriguing World Sized Between Earth, Venus

New Images From Euclid Mission Reveal Wide View of the Dark Universe

With NASA contributions, the mission will complement dark energy studies to be made by the agency’s upcoming Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. The Euclid mission, led by ESA (the European Space Agency) with contributions from NASA, has released five new images that showcase the space telescope’s ability to explore two large-scale cosmic mysteries: dark matter […]

NASA’s Compact Infrared Cameras Enable New Science

A new, higher-resolution infrared camera outfitted with a variety of lightweight filters could probe sunlight reflected off Earth’s upper atmosphere and surface, improve forest fire warnings, and reveal the molecular composition of other planets. The cameras use sensitive, high-resolution strained-layer superlattice sensors, initially developed at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, using IRAD, […]

Biking over your lifetime is associated with less knee pain or arthritis, study suggests

Bicycling, whether outdoors or in a spinning class, may help prevent knee arthritis and pain.

People who biked at any point in their lives were 17% less likely to develop knee pain and 21% less likely to develop arthritis with pain in the knee joint, according to an analysis of data from more than 2,600 people in their 60s. The report was published earlier this month in Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise .

“Based on our observational study, bicycling over a lifetime is associated with better knee health, including less knee pain and less damage to the joint,” said the study’s lead author, Dr. Grace Lo, chief of rheumatology at the Michael E. DeBakey VA Medical Center in Houston. “The more periods of time in life a person spent bicycling, the less likely she or he had knee pain and signs of osteoarthritis.”

From a more personal perspective, Lo said, “the findings from the study make me feel pretty good that I make my kids ride their bikes on a regular basis and I will continue to encourage that activity. I also am happy that I have a bike and I ride when I have a chance as well.” Lo is also associate professor of medicine at Baylor College of Medicine.

Biking builds muscles around the knees

People with knee arthritis are often told by their doctors to keep their joints moving, but until now it wasn’t clear what activity might be best for that. The new study suggests that biking may build muscles around the knees without the downside of jarring to the joints that might result from activities such as running.

Lo and her colleagues focused on a subset of volunteers from a larger study, the Osteoarthritis Initiative , a multicenter observational investigation that recruited people ages 45 to 79, some of whom had knee arthritis while some did not.

As part of the new research, eight years into the original study participants filled out a questionnaire that asked about leisure physical activity during four periods of their lives:

• Ages 12 to 18.
• Age 50 and older.

For each time period, the participants were asked how often they cycled. More than half of them had cycled consistently at some point in their lives. 

The data from the study can’t explain why biking might be protective. But Lo suspects that people who biked between 12 and 18, when most did it, built up their quadriceps and that development stayed with them even though they may not have continued to ride.

Biking may be so protective because it doesn’t jar the joints.

“We do know that activities that are non-weight bearing are less likely to cause pain,” Lo said. “That’s probably a reason why people have less pain when bicycling as compared to other activities.”

Latest fitness news

• What running does to the knees, according to a large survey of marathon runners.
• Why morning workouts may be better for weight loss.
• Torn ACLs may heal with therapy instead of surgery, though some surgeons aren't convinced.

When it comes to outside versus inside pedaling, Lo says there’s no research to determine whether one is better than the other. It’s just a matter of personal preference and convenience.

“This is a pretty cool study,” said Dr. Andrew Gregory, an associate professor of orthopedics neurosurgery and pediatrics at the Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville. “It’s advice we give out a lot but it’s good to be able to support that advice with evidence.”

Activities that involve moving the knee help maintain the health of cartilage.

"Movement of the joint is really important because it drives nutrients into the cartilage,” Gregory said, adding that this part of the knee has no blood supply of its own.

Which helps knees more — biking or running?

The big advantage biking has over running is it saves the knees from being jarred, Gregory said. In fact, people with knee arthritis probably shouldn’t be running, he added.

Moreover, biking strengthens an important group of muscles that isn’t built up by running.

“Running works the muscles that are in a straight line: the hamstrings, the quads and the calves,” Gregory explained. “Biking strengthens the glutes, which keep the hips and knees strong and that helps because they affect side to side motion.”

Without strong muscles on the sides of the legs, the knees are more vulnerable to injury.

The new study doesn’t suggest how often people should bicycle. But for that, you might want to fall back on general recommendations on how much activity is healthy, said Dr. Christine Peoples, a clinical associate professor of medicine in the division of rheumatology at the University of Pittsburgh.

“I would say, if you’re not active now, you should start slow and cycle two to three times a week pedaling slowly and at a low intensity," she said. “Make sure you’re on a bike with a supportive seat position. Then you can gradually increase the intensity.”

The study does have limitations. It doesn't prove that biking helped people’s knees — it can only show an association between cycling and less pain and joint damage, said Dr. Scott Barbuto, an assistant professor of rehabilitation and regenerative medicine at the Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons in New York City.

When a study is retrospective, meaning the data are examined after the fact, “you can never talk about causality,” he added. “And the authors do mention this as a limitation of the study.”

Still, Barbuto said, doing a prospective trial in which participants are randomly assigned to bike or not to bike is not feasible since it takes so long for arthritis to develop.

How does biking help the knees?

It’s possible that the nonconcussive exercise sparks the production of factors that limit the development of inflammation, Barbuto said. Moreover, it strengthens the muscles in the leg that support the knees, he said. And it does so without the impact stress on the joints you would get with running.

Rehab for an arthritic knee includes physical therapy to strengthen the muscles around the joint, he said.

Linda Carroll is a regular health contributor to NBC News. She is coauthor of "The Concussion Crisis: Anatomy of a Silent Epidemic" and "Out of the Clouds: The Unlikely Horseman and the Unwanted Colt Who Conquered the Sport of Kings." 

• Data library

The Best Time to Sell in 2024: The Week of April 14-20

Home sellers who are hoping to sell this year and looking for the perfect time to list should start getting ready—because the best time to list a home in 2024 is approaching quickly. 

The week of April 14–20 is expected to have the ideal balance of housing market conditions that favor home sellers, more so than any other w eek in the year. A recent survey from Realtor.com ® found that the majority (53%) of home sellers took one month or less to get their home ready to list, so the time to start prepping is now. 

This selection comes from looking at seasonal trends from 2018–19 and 2021–23 data and calculating a Best Time to List score for each week of the year, based on a combination of housing metrics. Notably, mortgage rates are not included in the score as mortgage rate movement has more to do with the larger economic context, and not seasonal shifts.

The State of the Housing Market

We expect the 2024 housing market to behave according to typical seasonality, but offer slightly better conditions than 2023. Each week was scored based on favorability toward sellers—this included competition from other sellers (active listings and new listings), listing prices, market pace (days on the market), likelihood of price reductions, and homebuyer demand (views per property on Realtor.com). Percentile levels for each week were calculated along each metric and were then averaged together across metrics to determine a Best Time to List score. Rankings for each week were based on these Best Time to List scores.

2023 was a fairly glum year in housing, with prices remaining near record high levels while inventory levels suffered. Mortgage rates started the year in the mid-6% range and climbed to nearly 8% in October , continuing to weigh down the affordability of housing payments despite unremarkable price growth.

Home prices peaked at a median listing price of $445,000 nationally in June 2023 , falling short of the previous year’s all-time high. Though prices did not reach a new peak this year, they remained near year-ago levels, failing to offer much relief to buyers. Buyer demand remained stifled as home shoppers took a step back amid high prices, elevated mortgage rates, and low inventory. 

Though low housing demand set the tone for much of 2023, homes still spent significantly less time on the market than before the COVID-19 pandemic, and inventory remained well below pre-pandemic norms.

Many homeowners felt “locked in” by their current mortgage , hesitant to list their home for sale and trade a sub-4% mortgage for a 7%-plus mortgage, which kept new listing activity low for much of the year.

Builders slowed new construction activity slightly in 2023 amid low buyer demand and economic uncertainty . Both single- and multi-family housing starts fell relative to the previous few years, but both remained above pre-pandemic levels as builders aimed to fill some of the gap left by low existing-home inventory. Though starts waned, new-home completions climbed relative to the previous year, supplying much sought-after inventory for buyers and renters alike.

 Mortgage rates fell quickly toward the end of the year as the Fed signaled that rate cuts were likely for 2024 , and as a result, both buyer and seller activity ticked up slightly heading into the new year.

In February, new listing activity climbed 11.3% , resulting in 14.8% more for-sale inventory in the month than one year prior. Though selling activity has picked up, inventory remains nearly 40% below pre-pandemic levels, making it a good time to be a seller today . While some homebuyers are waiting for mortgage rates to fall further before entering the housing market, it’s still a good time for homeowners to sell as buyers continue to need more for-sale options.

Benefits of listing a home the week of April 14–20, 2024

At a national level, this week represents a balanced selection of market conditions that favor sellers. While it does not have the highest price or the lowest time on the market of the year, this week offers higher-than-average prices and lower-than-average time on the market while also offering a higher-than-average number of buyers—measured as viewers per listing.

While affordability will continue to be a challenge for buyers and sellers who are looking to buy, we expect lower mortgage rates and more new-construction inventory to offer some relief and inject some life back into the market. In more balanced housing market conditions, we expect the benefits of strategically listing during the most seasonally advantageous week to be greater.

Above-average prices:  Homes during this week have historically reached prices 1.1% higher than the average week throughout the year, and are typically 10.4% higher than the start of the year. This year is likely to look a lot like 2023 due to still-high housing costs. If 2024 follows the 2023 seasonal trend, the national median listing price could reach $7,400 above the average week, and $34,000 more than the start of the year. 

Above-average buyer demand: The number of buyers looking at a listing can determine how many offers a home gets and how quickly it sells. The more buyers looking at a home, the better for the seller, and in most years, buyers start earlier than sellers.

Historically, this week garnered 18.4% more views per listing than the typical week. However, in 2023, this week got 22.8% more views per listing than the average week throughout the year. If mortgage rates fall more significantly this spring, it is possible that demand will surge sooner. However, if mortgage rates don’t soften until later in the year, then buyers may hold off in hopes of lower rates.

According to the February Fannie Mae housing survey , a near-all-time survey-high 35% of respondents indicated that they expect mortgage rates to go down in the next 12 months. After climbing through February, mortgage rates eased in the latest data. Mortgage rate expectations could lead more buyers to hold off until mortgage rates fall further, which may mean a slower ramp-up in demand this spring.

Fast market pace: Thanks to above-average demand, homes sell more quickly during this week.

Historically, homes actively for sale during this week sold 17%, or roughly 9 days, faster than the average week. In the 2023 market, this week saw homes typically on the market for 46 days, 6 days faster than the year’s average and 7 days faster than was typical in 2019. The 2023 market moved more slowly than the previous few years due to affordability challenges, but the market pace picked up toward the end of the year and into 2024 as easing mortgage rates stoked buyer demand. If inventory levels remain relatively low, time on the market may pick up faster as buyers vie for fewer homes.

Lower competition from other sellers: A typical inventory trend would mean 13.7% fewer sellers on the market during this week compared with the average week throughout the year. With few exceptions, the number of sellers tends to increase from the beginning of the year until roughly November. Last year saw more significant inventory gains after the first four months as buyer demand cooled, but sellers responded by pulling back on listings once again by the end of the year. Active inventory was 7.9% higher at the start of 2024 versus 2023 with the highest beginning-of-year inventory since 2020 . However, inventory was still 39.7% lower than pre-pandemic levels. This gap means there continue to be opportunities for sellers who enter the market this spring.

Below-average price reductions: Price reductions tend to peak in the fall as sellers left on the market after the summer rush try to attract attention. Price reductions tend to be the lowest from late winter into spring as buyer activity ramps up.

During the Best Week, roughly 24.6% fewer homes have had a price reduction than the average week of the year, which translates to a 0.9 percentage point lower price-reduced share compared with the average week of the year. In 2023, this week saw roughly 8,000 fewer listings with price reductions than the average week of the year.

Market dynamics shift—baby steps toward affordability

The 2023 housing market continued the slowdown seen in the second half of 2022. Home sales fell to the lowest level in over a decade as buyers struggled with still-high home prices and elevated mortgage rates. Sellers largely kept to the sidelines, hesitant to trade their existing mortgage for one with a much higher interest rate.

Though buyer demand waned, low for-sale inventory meant that buyers had fewer choices and faced competition in many markets, especially more affordable locales . As mortgage rates improved at the very end of the year, buyer demand picked up, indicating that home shoppers are eagerly awaiting a more affordable housing market.

Based on a recent survey , 40% of prospective buyers would find a home purchase feasible if rates were below 6%, and 32% would feel the same if rates fell below 5%.

• Mortgage rates are expected to ease into the mid-6% range. Mortgage rates reached as high as 7.79% in 2023 before falling into the mid-to-high 6% range by the end of the year. We expect mortgage rates to remain in this range until incoming economic data suggests that inflation is slowing toward the 2% target level. To date, both employment and inflation have remained strong, which means that the Federal Open Market Committee is likely to hold off on any cuts to the federal funds rate until later in the year. Once rate cuts seem probable, mortgage rates are likely to ease.
• Prices tend to peak later, as does competition. Sellers should consider that peak prices later in the season also come with greater competition from other sellers for a similar-sized pool of buyers. Historically, by the end of June, while prices reached near-peak levels (+13.8%) compared with the start of the year, new sellers also surged, increasing to nearly 1.5 times higher than at the start of the year (+49.3%). More sellers mean more options for buyers and therefore more competition among sellers . Sellers can mitigate that risk by being an early entrant into the market, raising their already high odds of a successful close and likely negotiating favorable terms.
• Level of buyer and seller activity will be fairly dependent on mortgage rates. Many homeowners are hesitant to enter today’s housing market since their current mortgage rate is much lower than today’s prevailing rate. However, buyers are likely to return to the housing market eagerly upon mortgage rate improvements, which means sellers still stand to see favorable buyer attention on their home listing due to low inventory. While overall buyer demand may not be what it was in the past couple of years, many areas are still seeing competition for homes due to low inventory levels. 

What does this mean for sellers?

While we’ve identified april 14–20 as the best week to list for sellers, the housing market remains undersupplied, so a seller listing a well-priced, move-in ready home is likely to find success., because spring is generally the high season for real estate activity and buyers are more plentiful earlier rather than later in the year, listing earlier in the spring raises a seller’s odds of a successful sale. sellers will want to remember that it’s a process and get started well before their intended listing date. recent realtor.com survey data shows that sellers typically took between a couple of weeks to a couple of months to prepare and list their home for sale., what does this mean for homebuyers.

For buyers who have been facing still-high home prices and elevated mortgage rates, there is a key takeaway: The usual seasonal dynamics of the housing market, builder sentiment, and general economic shifts suggest that it’s going to get better.

Inventory improved in late 2023, though levels remain below pre-pandemic levels. So far in 2024, new single-family construction activity and homebuilder sentiment have remained steady, and home completions have remained strong, suggesting that new inventory is likely to provide buyers more options into the spring.

Historically, the number of views per listing has cooled in the late summer/early fall and tends to improve for buyers from that point forward. Additionally, by mid-August, the number of sellers with actively listed homes increased 29% over the beginning of the year, which means more options for buyers . Thus, buyers who can persist in their home searches are likely to catch a bit of a break in the sense that they can expect some more options to choose from in the weeks ahead. 

Best Time to List—50 Largest Metro Areas

Methodology.

Listing metrics (e.g., list prices) from 2018–19 and 2021–23 were measured on a weekly basis, with each week compared against a benchmark from the first full week of the year. Due to the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, 2020 was an uncharacteristic year and has therefore been excluded from the analysis. Averaging across the years yielded the “typical” seasonal trend for each metric. Percentile levels for each week were calculated along each metric (prices, listings, days on the market, etc.) and then averaged together across metrics to determine a Best Time to List score for each week. Rankings for each week were based on these Best Time to List scores.

Sign up for updates

Join our mailing list to receive the latest data and research.

An official website of the United States government

The .gov means it’s official. Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

The site is secure. The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

• Publications
• Account settings

Preview improvements coming to the PMC website in October 2024. Learn More or Try it out now .

• Advanced Search
• Journal List
• v.321(7256); 2000 Jul 29

Which clinical studies provide the best evidence?

A common question in clinical consultations is: “For this person, what are the likely effects of one treatment compared with another?” The central tenet of evidence based medicine is that this task is achieved by using the best evidence combined with consideration of that person's individual needs. 1 A further question then arises: “What is the best evidence?” Two recent studies in the New England Journal of Medicine have caused uproar in the research community by finding no difference in estimates of treatment effects between randomised controlled trials and non-randomised trials.

The randomised controlled trial and, especially, systematic reviews of several of these trials are traditionally the gold standards for judging the benefits of treatments, mainly because it is conceptually easier to attribute any observed effect to the treatments being compared. The role of non-randomised (observational) studies in evaluating treatments is contentious: deliberate choice of the treatment for each person implies that observed outcomes may be caused by differences among people being given the two treatments, rather than the treatments alone. Unrecognised confounding factors can always interfere with attempts to correct for identified differences between groups.

These considerations have supported a hierarchy of evidence, with randomised controlled trials and derivatives at the top, controlled observational studies in the middle, and uncontrolled studies and opinion at the bottom. The best evidence to use in decisions is then the evidence highest in the hierarchy. Evidence from a lower level should be used only if there is no good randomised controlled trial to answer a particular clinical question. This view was supported by two studies that found larger effects in observational studies than in randomised controlled trials of the same treatment comparisons. 2 , 3

However, these findings were not confirmed by the two latest studies in the New England Journal of Medicine , which compared individual randomised controlled trials with observational studies in 19 therapeutic areas 4 and meta-analyses of randomised controlled trials with meta-analyses of cohort and case-control studies in five therapeutic areas. 5 No major differences were found between the estimates of treatment effects in the observational studies and randomised controlled trials.

Do these newer results overturn the idea of best evidence and mean that we should abandon the use of a hierarchy of evidence? The authors speculate that their latest comparisons of study designs failed to confirm older studies for two main reasons. Firstly, observational studies have improved (people who are given different treatments may be more comparable or researchers may be better at allowing for residual differences), and secondly, earlier comparisons used particularly poor observational designs (such as historical controls that use control data from a different set of people and from an earlier period than the one used for the treatment being studied).

However, an accompanying editorial 6 found three additional problems with the latest comparisons of observational studies and randomised controlled trials. 4 , 5 Firstly, the search for corresponding randomised controlled trials and observational studies in well known journals selected a small, potentially atypical subgroup of available randomised controlled trials. Conclusions based on the selected therapies might not extend to other areas. Secondly, one observational study did not involve any treatment but explored risk factors in the general population. Thirdly, meta-analyses and randomised controlled trials published after the studies in the New England Journal of Medicine did not follow the same pattern and disagreed with results of corresponding observational studies. For example, a new meta-analysis of breast cancer screening that included weighting by quality of randomised controlled trial found no evidence of benefit, in contrast to results from observational studies, 7 and a randomised controlled trial of hormone replacement therapy in menopausal women found no secondary prevention of coronary risk or reduced fracture risk, in contrast to numerous observational studies. 8

Even before the papers in the New England Journal of Medicine an earlier systematic review also found no consistent difference between randomised controlled trials and observational studies in estimates of the effects of treatment in 22 areas. 9 Differential quality of care, selection of people with a larger capacity to benefit, and publication bias against negative results from observational studies could explain larger treatment effects in either study design.

The issue is further confused by another systematic review published in JAMA that compared eight randomised controlled trials with non-randomised trials of the same intervention and found larger effects in five of the non-randomised trials. 10

It is not surprising that high quality randomised controlled trials and high quality observational studies can sometimes produce similar answers. Not all observational studies are misleading. The hierarchy of evidence is merely a convenient rule of thumb that, all other things being equal, randomised controlled trials are more able to attribute effects to causes. Randomised controlled trials that are well conducted remain the gold standard for evidence of efficacy. However, small inadequate ones do not automatically trump any conflicting observational study. Identifying the best evidence for any question requires detailed appraisal—for example, relevance, allocation concealment (ensuring that the assignment of interventions are unpredictable by all involved in the trial until the point of allocation), intention to treat analysis, and relevant outcomes. If high quality randomised controlled trials exist for a clinical question then they trump any number of observational studies. Limited randomised controlled trials need other forms of evidence to be appraised and considered.

A similar debate took place centuries ago in English law. The legal “best evidence rule” initially created a rigid hierarchy of evidence (that original written documents took precedence over oral evidence). It was replaced by the flexible principle that the weight given to each bit of evidence should be determined by a detailed appraisal of the characteristics of that evidence. 11

The new studies do not justify a major revision of the hierarchy of evidence, but they do support a flexible approach in which randomised controlled trials and observational studies have complementary roles. High quality observational studies may extend evidence over a wider population and are likely to be dominant in the identification of harms and when randomised controlled trials would be unethical or impractical.

Acknowledgments

Competing interests: SB edits a journal that uses a flexible hierarchy of evidence.

Watch CBS News

Research finds fish oil supplements may not be beneficial for healthy adults

By Mallika Marshall, MD

May 22, 2024 / 6:24 PM EDT / CBS Boston

BOSTON - If you're a healthy adult, you may want to avoid fish oil supplements.

Many people take fish oil supplements because they contain omega-3 fatty acids which have been shown to reduce inflammation and provide some heart-health benefits. But researchers found that taking these supplements regularly might actually increase the risk of stroke and heart disease in healthy adults.

They did find that these fish oil capsules reduced cardiovascular risk in people who already had it, but why do the supplements behave differently in healthy individuals? Experts say they may increase the risk of bleeding and could disrupt the healthy balance of fatty acids in healthy people.

So if you don't have heart problems, you might want to avoid fish oil supplements and instead eat a heart-healthy diet with natural omega-3 sources such as fatty fish.

• Heart Disease

Mallika Marshall, MD is an Emmy-award-winning journalist and physician who has served as the HealthWatch Reporter for CBS Boston/WBZ-TV for over 20 years. A practicing physician Board Certified in both Internal Medicine and Pediatrics, Dr. Marshall serves on staff at Harvard Medical School and practices at Massachusetts General Hospital at the MGH Chelsea Urgent Care and the MGH Revere Health Center, where she is currently working on the frontlines caring for patients with COVID-19. She is also a host and contributing editor for Harvard Health Publications (HHP), the publishing division of Harvard Medical School.

Featured Local Savings

More from cbs news.

Starting ADHD meds in adulthood may increase risk of heart disease, study says

Epidural during labor could help reduce complications after birth, study says

Could Ozempic eventually be used to treat addiction?

Could nightmares be a sign of common autoimmune disorders like lupus?