Centre of Research Excellence: Nutrition for Mother and Child

Targeted Nutrition to Improve Maternal and Child Health Outcomes
Centre of Research Excellence: Nutrition for Mother and Child
Project Status: In progress
Project administered by: The University of Adelaide

This Centre for Research Excellence is working across a range of projects to improve nutritional health outcomes for both mother and child.

It consists of four Themes:

  • Improving outcomes for mothers and children before and after birth by examining the best nutritional practice during this time.
  • Looking at how Omega 3 might be optimised to prevent premature births.
  • Improving outcomes for premature babies, with a particular focus on human milk.
  • Novel technologies to assess nutritional status.

The CRE in Targeted Nutrition to Improve Maternal and Child Health Outcomes will respond to the nutritional dichotomy that is facing our perinatal population - nutritional deficiencies that are more common in lower income groups and over-consumption of nutritional supplements that is more prevalent in higher income groups.

Plans are in place to address each of the issue raised in the above themes:

  • Best nutrition practice to improve perinatal outcomes - examining ways to improve the implementation of current evidence-based knowledge for women and young children.
  • Optimising fatty acids to prevent prematurity - addressing the most promising primary prevention strategy to reduce the risk of preterm birth through omega-3 long chain polyunsaturated fatty acids.
  • Improving the nutritional outcomes of preterm infants - improving understanding of nutritional requirements at different gestational ages with a special focus on human milk.
  • Novel tools for targeted nutrition - interconnecting and enabling the other three Themes by developing dried blood spot tests that can specifically assess nutritional markers that are sensitive to dietary change.

Project Leader

  • Professor Maria Makrides

    Professor Maria Makrides

This project is funded by the National Health and Medical Research Council