Liggins Institute

Nutrition

The role of nutrition in promoting health throughout the life course.

Fetus and newborn

Understanding the regulation of early life development in order to improve neonatal care and long-term health.

Developmental and neurobiology

Understanding the biological mechanisms of pregnancy, labour and perinatal brain development.

Clinical endocrinology

Effects of nutrition, preterm birth, in vitro fertilisation and exercise on growth, metabolism and the risk of diabetes, obesity and chronic disease in later life.

Developmental programming

Discovering how our early nutrition determines our future health and how we can reverse the pathways to obesity and diabetes.

Breast cancer

Developing new strategies to treat a disease affecting one in nine New Zealand women.

Public health and translational research

Applying lessons from biomedicine to improving the health of populations worldwide.

Centre for Human Evolution, Adaptation and Disease

Using concepts from evolutionary and developmental biology to interpret our experimental and clinical research.

Developmental epigenetics

Understanding the genetic mechanisms through which the early life environment determines an individual’s adult body type and health profile.

Research themes

Our research demonstrates the importance of children having a healthy start to life. We have shown that early life nutrition has a profound effect on health throughout life. Our interest in women’s health includes a major programme in breast cancer research.

We have a number of overlapping research themes exploring the ways in which factors in the early life environment affect health throughout the life course and influence the health of following generations. A poor start to life has long term consequences for the health and life prospects of the individuals who are affected and for the communities they live in.

Nutrition is potentially the most important environmental factor determining later life health. Poor antenatal nutrition, both under- and over-nutrition, may lead to chronic metabolic diseases (diabetes, obesity, heart disease) in adulthood, which in turn become major public health issues. As we age, nutrition becomes an important factor in maintaining health and reducing the incidence of disease.

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