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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: Completed
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

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

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SAHMRI is located on Kaurna Country. We pay respects to the Kaurna people of the Adelaide Plains and to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. We are committed to embracing knowledge and culture as we continue our working journey to incorporate Aboriginal health research across all of our themes and further reconciliation.

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"Tirki nguta tappa tangka marninithi"

(Learning and knowledge are the pathway to alter the mind)

- Uncle Lewis Yerloburka O’Brien, Kaurna Elder