Understanding the nutritional regulation of 'healthy' fetal and infant growth and development

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It is estimated that undernutrition (including deficiencies of key micronutrients) and sub-optimal breastfeeding is the cause of 3.1 million child deaths annually. Further, it is now widely accepted that nutrition during early life (including fetal life and early infancy) may 'programme' our future risk of a wide array of non-communicable diseases; the so called 'Developmental Origins of Health and Disease' (DOHaD) hypothesis. Taken together, this understanding of the importance of both the immediate and longer-term health consequences of undernutrition during our early life period, has placed a much greater focus on a 'life-course' strategy for disease prevention, recognising that there are periods in early-life that provide a 'window of opportunity' for nutrition interventions aimed at improving life-long health. In populations with widespread maternal and infant undernutrition, optimising growth during this critical phase of development is fundamental for improving health. The key ambition of this research is to provide an evidence base on the mechanisms that link undernutrition to growth failure, so effective interventions can be designed. To meet this ambition, this research will focus on four main objectives:1. To improve our understanding of what 'normal' and 'abnormal' fetal and infant development, with a specific focus on growth and brain development.2. To identify mechanisms through which maternal nutrition (before and during pregnancy) impacts on fetal and infant growth and brain development.3. To advance our understanding of the mechanisms linking infant nutrition to growth and development, with a specific focus on maternal nutrition and breast milk quality.4. To use this research to identify possible nutrition interventions for improvements in women's nutrition and infant health outcomes globally, and to test these interventions in new trials.This research will largely be focused in low- and middle-income settings, but with implications for nutritionally vulnerability globally.