For RESEARCHERS

Featured publication

The First 1000 Days - An Evidence Paper

​The focus of The First 1000 Days Paper is on the earliest stages of child development, the period from conception to the end of the child’s second year. This period has become known as the first 1000 days, a catchphrase that has become the rallying point for a number of Australian and international initiatives. While some of these have a general focus, such as the work of a cross-parliamentary group in the UK Parliament (Leadsom, Field, Burstow & Lucas, 2013; WAVE Trust, 2013, 2015), others are more narrowly focused on issues such as nutrition (Save the Children, 2012; Thousand Days, 2016) or on specific populations such as Aboriginal children (Arabena, HowellMuers, Ritte, & Munro-Harrison, 2015; Arabena, Ritte & Panozzo, 2016).

DOHaD Related Institutes

• ​​The Liggins Institute is an Auckland based dedicated research centre. Main focuses are how certain circumstances, encountered early during life can affect a individuals lifetime. Major findings by the institute include how high-fat diets during pregnancy affects obesity before puberty. 
• Murdoch Children's Research Institute is a Melbourne based research centre that is dedicated to the child's health. Research at the Murdoch includes diabetes, asthma, allegies and cancer and genetic disorders in children often in a DOHaD related context.
  
   

Information on the Science of Epigenetics

DOHaD Related Publications   DOHaD is an interesting and progressing field that implements state of the art research on early development of diseases by investigating the molecular biology such as epigenetics and DNA methylation. For further reading how exposure to certain conditions early during life can change epigenetics and contribute to onset of diseases in adult life, some published literature is highlighted in the following.
Inflammatory Diseases How the environment in childhood can have an influence on inflammation and inflammatory diseases was investigated recently in the PNAS article Social and physical environment early in development predict DNA methylation of inflammatory genes in young adulthood.	Metabolic Disorders In Early Life Nutrition, Epigenetics, and Programming of Later Life Diseases Mark H Vickers summarises research from epidemiology and animal models that support our today's knowledge how environmental conditions in the early life period can lead to changes in epigenetics and contribute to metabolic disorders such as obesity and type 2 diabetes  later in life. The cause of type 2 diabetes due to malnutrition in early life is further summarised more recently by Alexander M Vaiserman in the review article Early-Life Nutritional Programming of Type 2 Diabetes: Experimental and Quasi-Experimental Evidence.	Cardiovascular Diseases The way how undernutrition leads to low-birth-babies and changes in heart cell development that will have effects on the heart health during adult life was topic of the review Akt signaling as a mediator of cardiac adaption to low birth weight published in the Journal of Endocrinology earlier this year. ​​