Health
One Family’s Toxic Train Wreck Ordeal: Illness, Exile and Debt
When Jessica Albright returned with her family to their home in East Palestine, Ohio, last month after four months away, she opened the car door and took a deep breath — then stopped and thought: Maybe not too deep. Hauling suitcases up the steps, she tried to discern whether the acrid scent in the air had lessened.
The mother of three could not be certain — of the smell, of its effects or of the correct next steps for her family. After a train carrying toxic chemicals derailed a half-mile from the Albrights’ house in February, a series of mysterious health symptoms forced Ms. Albright; her husband, Chris, and two of their daughters to move to a hotel room in Pennsylvania 20 miles away.
Now, they were back, not because their health issues had resolved, or because the house had been proven free of contaminants. They were back because they had $41 left in their savings account and felt they had no other choice.
Despite several weeks of intense focus, national attention has long since shifted away from East Palestine, where the Ohio governor has declared the air and water safe, and the Environmental Protection Agency has cited “no evidence to suggest there is contamination of concern.” Schools reopened, the town held its annual street fair, and when summer came, the picnic tables at The Dairy Mill soft-serve stand were crowded once more.
But 200 cleanup workers still arrive each day, working on the 1.4 million gallons of liquid wastewater and 3,293 tons of excavated soil that, according to the Ohio E.P.A., must still be removed. Earlier this summer, independent researchers warned of chemical contamination in buildings near the derailment site. Hundreds of people have reported symptoms associated with the derailment in recent months. And lawmakers have been flooded with calls and emails from residents and business owners who say they cannot enter their buildings for more than a few minutes without getting headaches.
The derailment and burning of the train’s toxic freight generated hundreds of unknown compounds, scientists say. However, linking any health issues directly to the toxins is difficult, since even the ones detected are not fully understood. Six months later, residents still have little information about how they might be affected by any lingering chemicals, making it impossible to assess long-term risks.
Ms. Albright, 43, contemplated this as she unpacked toiletries in a house that no longer felt like home, in a town that had become deeply divided with infighting and conspiracy theories.
For her, as for many, the uncertainty transcended the question of whether the air, soil, and water were toxic, to a personal one: For a family in the throes of medical, emotional and financial crisis, what would come next?
Night of fire
The little brick house on East Main Street was where two families had become one. The home was where Ms. Albright raised Kaedance, now 20, and Lainy, 17; where Chris Albright, 48, had moved in and become the girls’ stepdad almost a decade ago; where he and Ms. Albright brought their newborn daughter, Evy, now 8, home from the hospital.
Until six months ago, Mr. Albright left early each day to work as a foreman on a gas pipeline. Mrs. Albright worked as a case manager for students with special needs and as an office manager at a local gym. Kaedance had transferred to a nearby campus so that she could live with her family; Lainy was hoping to become cheerleading captain. Evy, already at an 11-year-old reading level, was teaching herself to use FaceTime while spinning circles on a hoverboard in the living room.
On Feb. 3, after a high school basketball game, Lainy saw something on Snapchat about a fire. When Ms. Albright took their dogs, Maggie and Stanley, into the yard before bed, she smelled burning plastic, peered around the front of the house and froze: She could see the flames.
Mr. Albright told her to leave with the girls. He stayed, but police came by twice and warned, “If it gets bad, we aren’t coming back.” So he took his pickup truck and fled, too.
After they left, Norfolk Southern officials grew concerned about a chemical reaction that could send shrapnel into neighborhoods. Losing daylight, the company gave the fire chief 13 minutes to decide whether to vent and burn: Dig ditches, rig the cars with explosives, and light the contents on fire. “Blindsided,” he said, he agreed.
Within two days of the intentional burn, Gov. Mike DeWine of Ohio declared East Palestine safe. Air quality samples measured contaminants “below safety screening levels,” and residents could return, he said — so, that evening, the Albrights did.
“The birds have started singing again,” Ms. Albright said in an interview that week, “a natural indicator that things are getting better.”
She had heard rumors of government cover-ups, and when she put her girls to bed each night, she found herself worrying about potential long-term effects, like cancer — but when schools reopened, she sent them back.
“For them,” she said, “we’re just wanting to keep things as normal as possible.”
Nausea, headaches and breathing trouble
The first signs that their lives would be far from normal appeared in Mr. Albright’s primary care doctor’s notes, after his appointment on Feb. 22:
His appetite is down over the past few weeks.
Yesterday morning he had some dry heaving.
This morning he vomited while he was in the shower.
Some difficulties in taking deep breaths.
Mr. Albright had no medical history of concern. Certainly seems to have some symptoms that correspond to the recent train derailment and vinyl chloride spill, Dr. Jason Rodriguez wrote. He prescribed an albuterol inhaler and gave Mr. Albright the phone number for the county health department.
Mr. Albright didn’t know, but the day before his medical appointment, a group of researchers from Carnegie Mellon and Texas A&M universities had driven past his house in a van, testing the ambient air with a mass spectrometer. The device detected acrolein, a chemical irritant that slows breathing and causes burning in the nose and throat, at a level six times higher than normal. Animal studies show that long-term exposure to acrolein can cause nasal lesions or damage to the lining of the lungs.
The consulting firm hired by Norfolk Southern, meanwhile, had been testing houses for contamination using a hand-held device that could not detect some chemicals at specific thresholds. At one building, about eight blocks from the Albrights’ house, the firm reported “no detection” five times, despite a “super glue” smell so pungent that the staff fled the premises.
“The air monitoring team left within 10 minutes, due to the unpleasant/overwhelming odor,” one of the inspectors wrote in documents provided to the E.P.A. and obtained by The Times.
The building’s owner ordered private testing for $900. It detected butyl acrylate — a compound used to make paints and plastics and that causes respiratory irritation and breathing difficulty — among other chemicals, and enough soot for the insurance company to declare the contents of the space a total loss.
But no one offered to test the Albrights’ house, and the family could not afford private testing. Instead, the family read a statement from the governor on Feb. 26: The E.P.A. had “conducted indoor air testing at a total of 578 homes. No contaminants associated with the derailment were detected.”
The air seemed much clearer in Meadville, Pa., about 80 miles northeast, where Mr. and Ms. Albright took Evy to an overnight hockey tournament on March 4, and Mr. Albright felt significantly better there. When they returned home, the odor was stifling.
Ms. Albright tracked everyone’s symptoms in a pocket calendar: Evy had a cough, sore throat and nausea. Lainy had eye irritation and a headache. Mr. Albright felt as if he couldn’t breathe.
That week, seven field workers from the federal Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry fell ill while doing door-to-door community surveys near the Albrights, according to federal incident reports reviewed by The Times. They experienced many of the same symptoms — sore throats, headaches and nausea — and were sent back to their hotel to recover. The incident was kept private.
Two weeks later, Mr. Albright’s doctor scheduled him for an X-ray and CT scan of his chest, which showed fluid collecting in his lungs.
4 people, 2 dogs, 1 hotel room
On a Friday in March, while Mr. Albright was vomiting, Ms. Albright heard a rumor that Norfolk Southern would reimburse East Palestine residents for the cost of a hotel room. They left town immediately for Monaca, Pa., a half-hour drive just across the Ohio River, moving into a 400-square-foot room in a turquoise and brown hotel tucked behind a self-storage warehouse and a farm equipment supplier called Rural King.
Home2 Suites was among the only hotels that would accept 60-pound dogs, and it cost $235 per night. They got a $23 discount after a month, when they were considered residents. Norfolk Southern gave them $1,000 on a prepaid card upfront — enough for three nights — but for the more than 100 nights that followed, Ms. Albright traveled to the Norfolk Southern Family Assistance Center in East Palestine on a biweekly basis to have hotel bills reimbursed after the fact. The final cost was more than $22,000.
A spokesman for Norfolk Southern said that he could not comment on the family’s specific arrangement but that the train company routinely worked with families to pay hotel bills upfront for those who requested it.
“Norfolk Southern remains committed to making it right for the residents of East Palestine and surrounding communities,” he said, including making reimbursements for groceries, gas and other items to people who temporarily relocated.
The 40-mile round trip to the East Palestine schools was too far of a commute before Ms. Albright’s shifts, so Evy did worksheets from the hotel bed in Room #311 and took spelling tests on Zoom once a week. She kept in touch with her best friends, Jordyn and Braelynn, through an iPad gaming platform Roblox. Lainy taught herself pre-calculus and anatomy; her 11th grade U.S. government class couldn’t be taken virtually, so her teacher referred her to a college-level personal finance class instead. (Kaedance stayed with her boyfriend’s family to be closer to work and school.)
The family bought a $6 griddle to make grilled cheese sandwiches and used the hotel room microwave to make ramen — until Evy forgot to add water one evening and almost set the room on fire. Some nights, they ate McDonalds, or they waited until after 9 p.m., when they could get wings at Primanti Brothers for half-price.
Before dawn on March 28, Mr. Albright went to Pittsburgh for an echocardiogram. The results were crushing.
Markedly dilated ventricle, a cardiologist’s follow-up notes read. His ejection fraction, or the percentage of blood being pumped out with each heartbeat, — normally 50 percent or higher — was down to about 15 percent.
The doctor ordered a catheterization; Mr. Albright would be admitted overnight and fitted with a LifeVest, a round-the-clock external defibrillator for people at risk of sudden cardiac death.
Mr. Albright’s cardiologist, Dr. Matthew M. Lander, said it was unlikely that the toxins in East Palestine had wholly caused Mr. Albright’s heart failure. Still, given the rapid deterioration, Dr. Lander was confident that the chemicals — or the stress — had likely exacerbated the condition.
“I would be hard-pressed to think this is not related,” he said in an interview.
Lainy, already reeling from the cramped hotel room and social isolation, took her father’s news especially hard. She begged her mother to drive an hour to the high school, where a teacher pulled her aside. Lainy broke down. She needed a therapist, she said, but her mother couldn’t find one since her insurance policy was through Ohio, but they were staying in Pennsylvania.
For one week in May, Ms. Albright tried dropping Lainy off at the East Palestine house each morning before work, so she could catch a ride to school. Within 10 minutes, Lainy always had a gushing nosebleed — five times in one week.
Mr. Albright took Lainy to Applebee’s, just the two of them, and before her buffalo chicken tenders were at the table, he looked her in the eyes. “I’m not going anywhere — I’m going to be around, you know,” he remembers saying. “Just so I can keep bugging you.”
With Evy, he used fewer words, taking her out of the hotel every few days to fish for bluegill and rainbow trout at Brush Creek in Beaver Falls, Pa. He wanted to make for normal summer nights together. He taught her to cast, watch, reel. More than anything, he said, he wanted to teach her patience.
They often sat in silence, Evy fidgeting and Mr. Albright trying to forget the image of the 3,500 fish that had been floating, dead, in the streams back home.
“Evy knows,” Mr. Albright said, “but only what a 7-year-old should know.”
Financial crisis
Ms. Albright hardly had time to process her husband’s diagnosis. Financial constraints were beginning to suffocate them.
The pipelining company wasn’t willing to bring Mr. Albright back to work while he was wearing a LifeVest — too much of a liability — and agencies in Ohio and Pennsylvania bounced his unemployment claim back and forth for months. Ms. Albright tried to generate enough income from her two jobs to get by.
The family still owed monthly rent on their East Palestine house. Comcast kept sending bills, despite the vacancy. And while Norfolk Southern continued to reimburse hotel bills, the Albrights didn’t have enough cash to pay upfront.
One afternoon, at Norfolk Southern’s assistance center, Ms. Albright found herself pleading for help from an unsympathetic staffer. She burst into tears.
“I felt so dehumanized,” she wrote in a text to The New York Times.
No mother would choose a life for her children of burned ramen in a one-room home, she thought. But now, she couldn’t even choose that.
She knew the family needed to return to the East Palestine house, and she went first. Between her shifts, she ripped up the carpets and hauled them into the basement; bundled curtains and clothing into trash bags; brushed away the strange powdery substance that kept collecting on Evy’s playhouse.
It was she, not her husband, who ended up in the emergency room, in late May with stroke-level blood pressure. She had no medical history; her doctor suspected stress. She was given two medications and went back to work.
The community that the Albrights returned to last month was nothing like the one they had left. The main road into town was restricted — reserved for cleanup crews with badges — and two massive blue vats of potentially contaminated water had been erected downtown. The family’s street was dotted with “For Sale” signs, moving trucks, vacant houses.
Their tiny town, long divided by a railroad track, was now divided over what was worse: ignoring the potential health effects or risking economic disaster, as property values and small businesses grew weaker the longer the fiasco wore on.
The yard banners that had declared, “The greatest comeback story in American history” and “E.P. will not be derailed,” were mostly gone. Instead, neighbors and relatives were no longer speaking. Some people suspected — hoped — that families like the Albrights were simply paranoid and psychosomatic. Others openly speculated that they were faking their symptoms to get more cash from Norfolk Southern.
“A bunch of gold diggers trying to ack like they have chemist degrees,” one resident wrote on an online message board. “Your nothing but a embarrassment to East Palestine.”
Andrew J. Whelton, an environmental engineer who has led six field investigations to East Palestine since the derailment and has urged the E.P.A. and lawmakers to act, believes that chemical contamination inside buildings is still acute. In his view, the E.P.A. — the official incident commander of the recovery efforts — has too often deferred to Norfolk Southern and its consulting firm on key aspects of chemical surveillance.
“It’s not unusual that we’re seeing this pollution,” he said in an interview. “What is unusual, though, is the government turning a blind eye to this and allowing it to continue.”
The E.P.A. did not respond to multiple requests for a response but has maintained in recent public statements that “there is no evidence to suggest there is contamination of concern inside structures.”
One of the first mornings back, Evy pattered into the kitchen barefoot, weaving around boxes, negotiating with her parents whether she really did need to brush her hair. The rising sun caught her blue eyes through the window, as she nestled her head into her father’s chest, listening to his heart, reciting the steps she should take if the LifeVest were to sound.
At 7 a.m., they left for Pittsburgh — for another medical appointment — where Mr. Albright’s new cardiologist would tell him that several medication dosages would need to be increased, that there would be a $30 co-pay, more restrictions and more testing.
That night at home, Evy would crawl into her parents’ bed and fall asleep with an air purifier humming nearby.
It doesn’t do much to help the odor, they said, but it does drown out the trains.
In his first months in office, President Trump has slashed funding for medical research, threatening a longstanding alliance between the federal government and universities that helped make the United States the world leader in medical science.
Some changes have been starkly visible, but the country’s medical grant-making machinery has also radically transformed outside the public eye, a New York Times analysis found. To understand the cuts, The Times trawled through detailed grant data from the National Institutes of Health, interviewed dozens of affected researchers and spoke to agency insiders who said that their government jobs have become unrecognizable.
In all, the N.I.H., the world’s premier public funder of medical research, has ended 1,389 awards and delayed sending funding to more than 1,000 additional projects, The Times found. From the day Mr. Trump was inaugurated through April, the agency awarded $1.6 billion less compared with the same period last year, a reduction of one-fifth. (N.I.H. records for May are not yet comparable.)
The impacts extend far beyond studies on politically disfavored topics and Ivy League universities like Columbia or Harvard. The disruptions are affecting research on Alzheimer’s, cancer and substance use, to name just a few, and studies at public institutions across the country, including in red states that backed Mr. Trump.
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“I think people should know that research that they probably would support is being canceled,” said Eden Tanner, a chemist at the University of Mississippi, who had been working with a colleague at Ohio State University to develop a novel approach for treating glioblastoma, an aggressive form of brain cancer. Their grant had been awarded through a program designed to diversify the biomedical workforce; in April, they were notified that it was being terminated.
“I would like to cure brain cancer,” Dr. Tanner said. “I think that’s not particularly controversial.”
Mr. Trump’s campaign against medical research has been carried out without congressional approval, and the legality is unclear. Lawsuits have challenged the slashing or delaying of funding.
Federal officials, who have accused the N.I.H. of wasteful spending, have attributed the cuts to changing scientific priorities.
The N.I.H. “regularly examines its research portfolio” to determine which projects are “the most meritorious,” Andrew Nixon, a spokesman for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, said in an email. “Regular reviews of ongoing activities will help us determine the most strategic balance of projects to support and the best way to manage them going forward, especially as we need to be responsive to the often-changing nature of biomedical scientific progress.”
Scientists fear that the sweeping cuts could do long-term damage to U.S. scientific research, which has long driven medical and financial progress for the nation. “The country is going to be mourning the loss of this enterprise for decades,” said Dr. Harold Varmus, a Nobel Prize-winning cancer biologist who served as the director of the N.I.H. during the Clinton administration and the director of the National Cancer Institute under President Barack Obama.
Publicly announced cancellations
The federal government has announced the termination of 1,389 awards, with more than $820 million in recent funding.
N.I.H. grants, awarded in a competitive process, are typically paid out in installments. A researcher with a $1 million four-year grant, for instance, will get about $250,000 a year. Scientists can use this money to buy equipment and supplies and to pay the salaries of the researchers who work in their labs, among other things.
From 2015 to 2024, there have been fewer than 20 terminations a year, on average, according to Jeremy M. Berg, former director of the National Institute of General Medical Sciences at the N.I.H. from 2003 to 2011. They were generally for extenuating circumstances, such as illness or research misconduct.
But since late February, the government has publicly announced the cancellation of 1,389 N.I.H. awards. The agency scoured grants for key words and phrases like “transgender,” “misinformation,” “vaccine hesitancy” and “equity,” ending those focused on certain topics or populations, according to a current N.I.H. program officer, who asked not to be identified for fear of retribution.
Studies focused on sexual and gender minority groups were among the first on the chopping block.
Katherine Bogen, a doctoral student at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, had been studying post-traumatic stress, alcohol use and intimate partner violence against bisexual women. The termination notice she received assailed studies “based primarily on artificial and nonscientific categories,” calling such research “antithetical to the scientific inquiry” and alleging that it was “often used to support unlawful discrimination on the basis of race and other protected characteristics, which harms the health of Americans.”
The language was “very insulting,” she said. “I get this letter that tells me, ‘Your research is not science. Not only is it ascientific, it’s a useless drain on resources, and, in fact, your research could be used to discriminate against ‘actual’ Americans or ‘regular’ Americans,’ or whatever they mean.”
The cuts spread to grants on health equity and racial and ethnic groups. Affected projects sought to improve access to mental health care for Latino, low-income and rural communities; to reduce maternal mortality among Black women; and to prevent gun violence in Asian American communities.
Tsu-Yin Wu, a researcher at Eastern Michigan University who led the gun violence project, said that community leaders and study participants were “greatly disappointed” by the grant cancellation. “Some felt betrayed that their voices and engagement no longer matter.”
The agency cut grants for research on vaccine hesitancy, disinformation and misinformation, including a Northeastern University study on cancer misinformation on social media.
It also axed research on Covid-19, including studies that could have helped the nation respond to many infectious disease threats. Among them: a grant to Emory University and Georgia State University, where researchers had developed three potential drugs that showed promise against many RNA-based viruses, including coronaviruses, Ebola, avian influenza and measles, said George Painter, a pharmacologist at Emory who was co-leading the research.
In April, the agency terminated, in part or in whole, more than 350 grants meant to support students, early-career scientists or researchers from groups underrepresented in science. Among these terminations were F31 diversity grants, awarded to Ph.D. students who were members of certain racial or ethnic groups, disabled or from disadvantaged backgrounds.
At the University of Pittsburgh, Luzmariel Medina-Sanchez, who was born and raised in Puerto Rico, and Sierra Wilson, a first-generation college student from Utah, both had their grants canceled. “It’s not even about the work I’m doing,” said Ms. Wilson, who studies how liver cells respond to drug overdoses. “It feels like it’s about me.”
Ms. Medina-Sanchez, who studies how a microbe can help treat celiac disease, said she may leave science altogether. “I feel racially targeted,” she said. “I feel like I’m not going to be a professional in the field of science in America, because obviously my name is Luzmariel.”
(Ms. Wilson and Ms. Medina-Sanchez stressed that they spoke only for themselves and not for the university.)
Delayed funding
In addition to publicly announced cancellations, these are the nearly 1,100 grants that have been delayed, with nearly $740 million in funding.
Besides outright canceling projects, N.I.H. failed to distribute annual payments to more than 1,000 grants, The Times found.
The delays have stifled research on drug discovery, blood vessel health and injury response. In some cases, scientists have cut staff, paused hiring, trimmed back supplies or delayed experiments. Health officials have not explained which projects have been held up, why or for how long.
The Times compiled a list of the delayed grants by searching N.I.H. databases as of June 2 for ones that were funded in 2024 and expected to last beyond 2025, but have not gotten disbursements on schedule.
In the past, annual renewals were routine. Scientists submitted progress reports; the N.I.H. reviewed them and usually continued funding them, occasionally with a week or two of delays. But longer delays have become much more common since Mr. Trump took office.
Joshua Kritzer, a professor of chemistry at Tufts University, investigates the basic science behind potential drug candidates, laying the groundwork for future medications. Most of his lab work is supported by a five-year N.I.H. grant that received $1.4 million over the past two years. But since February, he had been waiting for the third year of expected funding to come in. He slashed purchases of essential supplies and contemplated laying off crucial researchers on his team.
On Tuesday, Kritzer finally received word that his funding had been released, several days after The Times asked federal officials about his and other delayed awards.
“Every week that’s delayed, it’s easily probably three to four weeks to get that research back to where it was,” said Dr. Kritzer, who noted that he was speaking for himself and not for his institution.
Mr. Nixon, the Department of Health spokesman, said that the agency would not discuss deliberations about specific awards but encouraged grant recipients to “speak with the designated N.I.H. officials on their award notice when questions arise.”
In some cases, delays have lasted so long that scientists wondered whether their grants were subject to a “shadow termination.”
The delays stem in part from additional screening for whether the grants align with Trump administration priorities, N.I.H. officials said. Other renewals have been delayed as overstretched N.I.H. staff members work through backlogs in funding. And political appointees are now vetting some projects, too, slowing the process further.
N.I.H. officials said they feared being fired if they processed a grant renewal that the administration disfavored.
In early May, Jon Lorsch, a longtime N.I.H. institute director who was recently promoted to acting deputy director of the agency’s external funding arm, emailed staff members denouncing the renewal of grants “that focused on topics that are not supported under N.I.H./H.H.S.’s priorities,” according to a copy of the email seen by The Times.
“The consequences of approving an award that should not have been approved could be very serious,” he wrote.
But Courtney Griffin, who leads a lab at the Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation and studies blood vessel development and disease, including complications due to diabetes, expressed confusion as to why her expected funding is not coming through. She and her colleagues were making contingency plans and looking for other sources of funding.
“It’s, ironically, a really inefficient use of people’s time to be in this guessing game,” she said, adding that the time could be better spent on biomedical research.
Months-long delays are also affecting new grants that were being vetted when the Trump administration cracked down on grant reviews.
A number of major Alzheimer’s Disease Research Centers, some of which have operated for decades, have waited months for the Trump administration to decide whether to award them fresh five-year grants. The funding gaps have set back ongoing studies and curtailed efforts to take images of patients’ brains, though the N.I.H. has recently told some centers that they would soon receive funding.
“These centers have become a safety valve for people who can’t get a neurology appointment at a private center,” said Dr. Ann Cohen, a co-director of the University of Pittsburgh Alzheimer’s center. Now, she said, things have changed. “There are fewer clinic appointments, fewer opportunities for these individuals to get brain imaging.”
The N.I.H. has also said that it will no longer fund projects in which U.S. researchers distribute some of their money to international partners, throwing the future of many global health projects into question and creating funding delays for ongoing research.
Beyond the disruption of individual projects, other proposed changes could undermine scientific research across the board, experts said. One would sharply curb funding for indirect research costs, such as building maintenance and administrative staff. And then there is Mr. Trump’s proposal to slash the N.I.H.’s total budget by about $18 billion, a cut of almost 40 percent.
A budget cut of that scale would be “truly draconian,” said Dr. Varmus, the former N.I.H. director, who said he hoped Congress would not approve such a sharp reduction. It could leave the agency without enough money to fund promising new work, drive some scientists overseas and prompt some up-and-coming researchers to leave science altogether, he said. “You can completely destroy the system in just a couple of years,” Dr. Varmus said.
Methodology
The Times’s analysis of cancellations is based on the list of terminated grant awards published by the Department of Health and Human Services as of May 30, 2025, and on records from RePORT, the National Institutes of Health’s registry of grants and projects, as of June 2, 2025.
Each circle in the graphics represents a grant award. The circles are sized by the total funding that N.I.H. authorized for each award. H.H.S.’s list of terminations includes a mix of main grant awards, supplements and amendments. The list also indicates a “total amount obligated,” but that figure generally is the total amount awarded to a grant over its lifetime, including any supplements and amendments, rather than the amount for the specific award terminated. The Times’s analysis above uses only the amount authorized for the specific award listed. In some cases, scientists had already spent much of the money they had been awarded before their grants were cancelled, but in others, they lost out on their entire awards. Award amounts and totals — including the year-to-year funding shortfall calculated by The Times — do not include N.I.H. grants administered by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, because their funding amounts are not available in RePORT.
The Times examined cancellations of grants intended to train and support research by groups underrepresented in science. These include the R25 education program; the T32 and T34 training programs; F31 diversity grants; R01 research grants under funding opportunity number PAR-22-241 and research supplements under funding opportunity number PA-23-189, both of which are specifically intended to promote diversity among grant recipients.
To identify grants with delayed funding, Times journalists used information about each grant’s planned duration and prior awards, focusing on those that were eligible for continuation or noncompeting renewal. To account for reporting lags in the RePORTER database, The Times limited this analysis to a time period from Jan. 20 to April 30. The Times excluded grants that appear on H.H.S.’s public list of terminations and grants that have been marked in RePORTER as terminated. Based on interviews and an analysis of historical renewal data, The Times found such grants typically receive a notice of award at roughly the same time each year. Each circle representing a delayed grant is sized by the amount its main award received in fiscal year 2024. This list may include a small number of grants whose renewals are not yet recorded in N.I.H. databases, and others whose renewals are expected to be delayed, because of conversion of grant status for an investigator changing roles or institutions.
To classify each grant’s area of research, The Times extracted the title, the public health relevance statement and the abstract from the N.I.H.’s RePORTER database and ExPORTER files. These fields were used as input for a series of automated prompts to a large language model.
The model generated a brief description of the grant’s research objective. The model also determined if grants were related to research in areas like chronic diseases, vaccines, pandemic preparedness, misinformation, sexual and gender identity, health disparities and certain ethnic and racial groups, and diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, and then assigned categories.
Times journalists read the projects’ public health relevance statements and abstracts, and they checked the assigned categories for accuracy. They also checked hundreds of grant descriptions and edited them for accuracy and clarity. Only the project descriptions that have been edited by Times journalists are displayed in the article.
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Carbohydrates may have gotten a bad rap, but a new study from Tufts University finds that some are better than others — and that older women in particular could reap the benefits.
The research, which was recently published in the journal JAMA Network Open, found that daily consumption of fiber and “high-quality” carbs in midlife can contribute to healthier aging and overall better wellness among older females.
The researchers defined “healthy aging” as “the absence of 11 major chronic diseases, lack of cognitive and physical function impairments, and having good mental health.”
EXPERTS REVEAL HIDDEN WAYS SUGAR ACCELERATES AGING BEYOND JUST WEIGHT GAIN
The study was led by researchers from the Jean Mayer USDA Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging (HNRCA) at Tufts University and Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
“The main takeaway of the study is that consuming dietary fiber and high-quality carbohydrates — those from fruits, vegetables, whole grains and legumes — is associated with positive health status in older adulthood,” lead author Andres Ardisson Korat, a scientist at HNRCA, told Fox News Digital.
Daily consumption of fiber and high-quality carbs in midlife can contribute to healthier aging and overall better wellness among older females. (iStock)
“This includes the absence of chronic diseases and good physical and cognitive function.”
The researchers collected data from the Nurses’ Health Study, in which 47,000 women reported their dietary habits and health outcomes between 1984 and 2016, according to a Tufts press release.
The women ranged in age from 70 to 93 by the end of the study period.
EATING THIS BREAKFAST FOOD COULD HELP YOU LIVE LONGER, STUDY SUGGESTS
The researchers looked at the women’s consumption of dietary fiber, total carbohydrates, refined carbohydrates, high-quality (unrefined) carbohydrates, and carbohydrates from whole grains, fruits, vegetables and legumes.
They also analyzed glycemic index (each food’s score indicating how much it raises blood sugar) and glycemic load, which also takes into account portion size to provide a more accurate measure of each food’s impact on blood sugar.
“It’s not just about ‘carbs versus fats versus protein’ — it’s about what kind of carbs you’re eating.”
Women who consumed higher amounts of total carbohydrates; high-quality carbohydrates from whole grains, fruits, vegetables and legumes; and total dietary fiber in midlife were 6% to 37% more likely to have healthy aging and to score higher in several areas of mental and physical wellness, the study found.
Conversely, consuming refined carbohydrates — which come from added sugars, refined grains and potatoes — and starchy vegetables resulted in a 13% reduced chance of healthy aging.
Quality over quantity
“This study reinforces something many of us intuitively feel: quality matters,” noted Melanie Avalon, a health influencer, entrepreneur and biohacker based in Atlanta, Georgia.
“It’s not just about ‘carbs versus fats versus protein’ — it’s about the kind of carbs you’re eating.”
The researchers looked at the women’s consumption of dietary fiber, total carbohydrates, refined carbohydrates, high-quality (unrefined) carbohydrates, and carbohydrates from whole grains, fruits, vegetables and legumes. (iStock)
Avalon, who was not involved in the research, discussed some of the more notable findings with Fox News Digital.
“Perhaps most surprising was the finding that replacing just 5% of calories from carbohydrates with protein (from either plant or animal sources) was associated with lower odds of healthy aging by 7% to 37%,” she said.
HEALTHY EATING IN MIDDLE AGE HAS THIS KEY LONGEVITY BENEFIT
Avalon also noted that when carbohydrates were segmented by type — processed versus unprocessed — the associations with healthy aging were independent of BMI (body mass index), a metric typically closely linked to metabolic health.
“This suggests the effects of carbohydrate quality on healthy aging were not solely explained by weight-loss effects,” she said.
Based on the study findings, experts recommend focusing on whole, unprocessed foods, including fruits, vegetables, legumes and whole grains. (iStock)
The study also briefly touched on the controversial topic of seed oils.
“It found that higher intake of polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFAs) — which are commonly found in seed oils — was linked to decreased odds of healthy aging, adding nuance to the ongoing debate,” Avalon added.
Based on the study findings, the biohacker recommends favoring whole, unprocessed foods, including fruits, vegetables, legumes and whole grains.
“Shop the perimeter of the grocery store for produce and whole grains, as well as the freezer aisles for frozen fruit and vegetables,” she suggested. “Consider dipping into the aisles only for pantry staples like canned legumes.”
For those who tolerate grains, people can reap the benefits of foods like quinoa, brown rice, oats and whole wheat products, Avalon noted.
“Prioritize fiber-rich foods and minimize refined carbohydrates like white bread, sugary beverages and ultraprocessed snacks,” an expert advised. (iStock)
“Prioritize fiber-rich foods and minimize refined carbohydrates like white bread, sugary beverages and ultraprocessed snacks.”
“These shifts can meaningfully support healthy aging and reduce the risk of chronic disease.”
Limitations and future research
One chief limitation of the study is that the participants were mainly white female healthcare workers.
“Because of the observational nature of the study, we cannot rule out confounding by other variables,” Korat said. “We would have liked to have data on men to evaluate the associations in this group.”
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The researchers called for more diverse studies that look closer at how dietary fiber and high-quality carbs contribute to healthy aging.
“We hope our findings help inform consumers about the importance of healthy diets in the promotion of healthy aging,” Korat added.
“Personalized nutrition, grounded in both science and self-awareness, may be key to thriving across the decades.”
“The more we can understand about healthy aging, the more science can help people live healthier for longer.”
Avalon added that while diet is “foundational,” it’s just one piece of the “healthy aging puzzle.”
For more Health articles, visit www.foxnews.com/health
“Exercise, sleep, stress management and social connection all play a role,” she said.
“Ultimately, personalized nutrition, grounded in both science and self-awareness, may be key to thriving across the decades.”
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