Research
Exploring key issues in mother and child health
PERU researchers work in collaboration with researchers and clinicians in a wide range of disciplines to explore important questions about mother and child health. Some of the pressing issues they study include:
- The effects of excess pre-pregnancy weight and weight gain during pregnancy on women’s long term-health and the health of their offspring
- How in utero exposure to chemicals in the environment affects newborns’ and young children’s health, particularly in terms of immune system development and metabolic regulation
- How obesity in childhood affects children’s use of the health care system and risk for chronic illness later in life
- The effect of schools’ health culture and programs on children’s physical activity levels, academic performance and health
- Vitamin D status in pregnant women and its potentially protective effects
The best data, the best research
Epidemiological research depends on rich sources of data. The PERU team is fortunate to have access to world-renowned databases, such as the Nova Scotia Atlee Perinatal Database. Established in the 1980s, the Atlee was the first provincial, population-based perinatal database in Canada. As one of the longest-running, most-extensive perinatal databases in the world, it allows PERU researchers to capture a wealth of longitudinal health information. Linking Atlee data to numerous other databases provides the researchers with many opportunities to study the consequences of pregnancy conditions on long-term maternal and offspring health—even across multiple generations.
Teamwork for funding success
The PERU research team has built a strong network of collaborators—within Dalhousie University and the IWK Health Centre and with researchers across the country—to address such complex issues as maternal and childhood obesity and the impact of environmental exposures on reproductive health and child outcomes. This teamwork approach has helped PERU’s faculty researchers and their collaborators succeed in obtaining numerous substantial multi-year grants from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research and other funding agencies, including the Nova Scotia Health Research Foundation, IWK Health Centre, Dalhousie University and the Atlee Foundation.