Pregnancy disorders and impact on child development and wellbeing: Maternal, placental and fetal considerations

A healthy pregnancy is the cornerstone for a great start in life and for the best outlook of our next generation of Canadians. Pregnancy constitutes, for both the mother and her child, a highly influential period that can affect their health statuses both from short- and long-term perspectives. We propose, through a multidisciplinary consortium of investigators, to study adverse pregnancy outcomes and child development, using an integrated infrastructure that allows the sharing of expertise and access to an important cohort of women and their offspring from three sites of Eastern Canada characterized by geographically stable populations. This will permit knowledge exchange through research projects related to mother, f¿tal and children development and follow-up. The goals of this network are 1) to create a research infrastructure that allows to follow a cohort of pregnant women and their children through standardized collection of samples and data and 2) to understand how the physical, psychosocial, nutritional and biomedical environments interact, over time, together with genetic inheritance to affect the course of pregnancy, child development and mother¿s health and, 3) from this acquired knowledge, to develop new means of early identification of at-risk cases for improving diagnosis, treatment and interventions, which should clearly contribute to improve health care services offered to Canadian women and their children and ultimately the health of all Canadians.