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Pennington Biomedical Q&A: Dr. Hannah Cabré
Hannah Cabré, PhD, RDN, has earned many laurels in her career, but is not one to rest on them and take them for granted. Always in pursuit of clarity and new discoveries in reproductive health, she is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Reproductive Endocrinology and Women’s Health Labatory at Pennington Biomedical Research Center. Under the mentorship of Dr. Leanne Redman and Dr. Eric Ravussin, she is a registered dietician and exercise physiologist, and she was recently named as the Center’s Postdoctoral Fellow of the Year, in part for her dedication to women’s health.
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Pennington Biomedical Research Center’s April Small Shifts Focus: Office and Home Workouts
Pennington Biomedical Research Center is excited to announce that April's focus for the Small Shifts campaign is integrating brief office and home workouts into daily routines. The Small Shifts initiative is part of the Center's ongoing commitment to promoting manageable lifestyle changes that lead to long-term health and well-being.
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Pennington Biomedical Researchers Identify Neurons in Brain that Regulate Energy Levels and Body Temperature
Scientists at Pennington Biomedical Research Center have gained greater clarity in the brain regions and neurons that control metabolism, body temperature and energy use. Featured in the February edition of the journal Metabolism, Dr. Heike Münzberg-Gruening and a team of researchers discovered which chemicals influence the signals that control how much energy the body uses. In “Leptin Receptor Neurons in the dorsomedial hypothalamus require distinct neuronal subsets for thermogenesis and weight loss,” researchers laid out the pathways, chemicals, neurons and brain regions that are activated.
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Pennington Biomedical’s Dr. Yun Shen Awarded $250,000 to Explore AI for Hypertension Management in Type 2 Diabetes Care
Pennington Biomedical Research Center’s Dr. Yun Shen will lead a team to explore the use of AI for precision hypertension management in Type-2 diabetes care. The research is funded through an award of $250,000 from the Collaboration in Action Program, established by Championship Health Partners LSU and Our Lady of the Lake Health.
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Pennington Biomedical Among AWI Awards to Advance the Welfare of Animals Used in Research
The Animal Welfare Institute, or AWI, is pleased to announce the 2024 winners of the Refinement Research Award, which funds research projects that develop or test novel refinement methods, and the Implementing Refinement Grant, which funds the purchase of equipment or training meant to improve the welfare of animals used in research.
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Pennington Biomedical Researchers Uncover Role of Hormone in Influencing Brain Reward Pathway and Food Preferences
When faced with multiple food options and ultimately choosing one, the factors of that decision-making process may be more physiological than previously assumed. A group of scientists led by Pennington Biomedical Research Center’s Dr. Christopher Morrison recently discovered that the hormone fibroblast growth factor 21, or FGF21, plays an influential role in brain reward mechanisms like those involved in dietary choices.
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Can Exercise Help Colon Cancer Survivors Live as Long as Matched Individuals in the General Population?
Physical activity may help colon cancer survivors achieve long-term survival rates similar to those of people in the general population, according to a recent study published by Wiley online in CANCER, a peer-reviewed journal of the American Cancer Society.
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Pennington Biomedical’s Wellness Day for Women Celebrates 25 Years
The Irene W. Pennington Wellness Day for Women celebrates its 25th anniversary in 2025 as it returns to Pennington Biomedical on Saturday, March 8, from 7 a.m. to 1 p.m. The event features a wide array of health screenings, services and other activities to participants from across the Capital region. Registration is open now and can be accessed on the Pennington Biomedical website.
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New Toolkit Empowers Healthcare Providers with Evidence-Based Strategies for Childhood Obesity Prevention and Treatment
Greaux Healthy—a public service initiative powered by Pennington Biomedical Research Center, in partnership with the State of Louisiana—is proud to announce the release of the Childhood Obesity Prevention, Evaluation and Treatment Toolkit, a comprehensive resource designed to equip healthcare providers with practical, evidence-based guidance for preventing, evaluating, and treating childhood obesity and its related comorbidities.
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It All Starts in the Lab
Each day when Dr. Jason Collier arrives at his office, he sees a poster of a child with hundreds of needles across their arms and legs. The image represents how many insulin shots that child would need over a several-month period to control their blood glucose. “That’s a very big motivating factor to solve the problems that are in front of us,” he says.
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Global Launch of the Lancet Commission on Definition and Diagnostic Criteria of Clinical Obesity Recording Available Online
The Commission’s report made headlines in thousands major media outlets around the world. Watch the video recording of the launch event where members of the Commission present the key findings and discuss their implications for practice and policy with guest experts gathering at the Royal College of Physicians in London and at Pennington Biomedical Research Centre in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
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Pennington Biomedical Researchers Assemble Comprehensive History of Electronic Health Records and their Role in Medical Research
Dr. Yun Shen and Dr. Gang Hu of Pennington Biomedical Research Center have recently published a piece in the Journal of Medical Internet Research, or JMIR. The study titled “Twenty-Five Years of Evolution and Hurdles in Electronic Health Records and Interoperability in Medical Research: Comprehensive Review,” explores how electronic health records’ use in medical research has evolved over the past 25 years. Dr. Shen and Dr. Hu have extensive experience in working with electronic health records to study chronic diseases, population health trends, and predictive analytics.
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Pennington Biomedical’s Dr. Kaja Falkenhain Awarded Postdoctoral Fellowship from the American Heart Association
Dr. Kaja Falkenhain, postdoctoral researcher at Pennington Biomedical Research Center, has been awarded a postdoctoral fellowship from the American Heart Association. The fellowship comes with a grant of over $150,000 to be used over two years to support Dr. Falkenhain's research project, titled “Craving Control: Rewiring the Reward Circuitry of the Human Brain in the Modern Food Environment,” which will study the brain’s reward circuitry and ingestive behavior at the intersection of obesity medication and modern food environment.
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Pennington Biomedical Research Foundation’s Annual Fundraiser ‘The Answer’ Celebrates 10th Anniversary
Pennington Biomedical Research Foundation, the fundraising support partner for Pennington Biomedical Research Center, is hosting its annual signature fundraising event “The Answer” on Friday, March 21, at 5:30 p.m. at the C.B. Pennington Conference Center on the campus of Pennington Biomedical. To celebrate The Answer’s 10th anniversary of generating support for the research center’s biomedical breakthroughs, the night’s theme will be “Decades of Discovery.”
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Pennington Biomedical Contributes to Study Advancing Medical Imaging on Body Fat and Muscle Distribution
A recent study introduces an innovative method for analyzing body composition using advanced 3D imaging and deep learning techniques. This approach aims to provide more accurate assessments of body fat and muscle distribution, which are crucial for understanding health risks associated with various conditions. The study, “3D Convolutional Deep Learning for Nonlinear Estimation of Body Composition from Whole Body Morphology,” authored by researchers from Pennington Biomedical Research Center, University of Washington, University of Hawaii and University of California-San Francisco was recently published in NPJ Digital Medicine, a journal of the Nature portfolio.
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Opportunities to Contribute to Science
To date, more than 65,000 people have been screened to participate in a clinical trial at Pennington Biomedical Research Center. Kytara Gaudin Christophe and her daughter, Chloe, share their experiences as Pennington Biomedical trial participants.
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Pennington Biomedical’s Pediatric Obesity and Health Behavior Laboratory Authors Childhood Obesity’s Most Downloaded Paper of 2024
"Closing the Gap Between Evidence and Practice for Childhood Obesity Treatment," authored by Pennington Biomedical’s Pediatric Obesity and Health Behavior Laboratory’s Dr. Amanda Staiano and Dr. Alyssa Button, was the most downloaded paper in 2024 from Childhood Obesity, a leading peer-reviewed journal dedicated to strategies for obesity prevention and weight management in children and adolescents.
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Pennington Biomedical Researchers Serve on Global Commission on Clinical Obesity that Goes Beyond BMI in Defining Obesity as a Disease
Three researchers from Pennington Biomedical Research Center served on the Lancet Commission on Clinical Obesity, a global group that generated a new approach to diagnosing clinical obesity. The diagnosis is based on evaluations in addition to body mass index, or BMI, such as measures of excess body fat and objective signs and symptoms of ill health at the individual level.
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The Lancet Diabetes & Endocrinology: Global Commission Proposes Major Overhaul of Obesity Diagnosis
A global Commission, published in The Lancet Diabetes & Endocrinology and endorsed by more than 75 medical organisations around the world, presents a novel, nuanced approach to diagnose obesity, based on other measures of excess body fat in addition to body mass index (BMI), and objective signs and symptoms of ill health at the individual level.
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Monoclonal Antibody Ponsegromab Shown to Reduce Effects of Cancer-Related Wasting Syndrome
Cachexia, also known as wasting syndrome, commonly occurs in patients with certain cancers, leading to dangerous weight loss and functional impairment. Medicinal treatments for this condition are rare, but a recent study demonstrated that the antibody ponsegromab is both safe and effective in treating muscle wasting and weight loss in cancer patients. Pennington Biomedical Research Center was one of more than 70 facilities globally to host the study testing the efficacy of this antibody.
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