About the project
Recent evidence suggests that vitamin D supplementation during pregnancy has benefits for maternal and offspring health. This project will use novel and existing data (blood biomarker, genetic and epigenetic data together with detailed clinical assessments of bone density and microarchitecture) to establish methods of personalising pregnancy vitamin D supplementation to optimise offspring musculoskeletal development
The MRC Lifecourse Epidemiology Centre (University of Southampton) is a world-leading research centre for musculoskeletal lifecourse epidemiology and early life programming. Using the internationally unique MAVIDOS randomised controlled trial, we have demonstrated that pregnancy vitamin D supplementation increases offspring bone mass at age 4 years. Detailed assessment of the children at 6-7 years including dual-energy X-ray Absorptiometry (DXA) and high resolution peripheral quantitative computed tomography (HR-pQCT; virtual bone biopsy) has been undertaken. In the UK, it is currently recommended that all women take vitamin D during pregnancy, but routine use of supplementation is low. Personalised approaches to medicine include both establishing characteristics which may direct the need for dose stratification and understanding current barriers to the use of supplementation.
The specific aims of this project will be to:
- Assess the effect of pregnancy vitamin D supplementation on growth in utero and during early childhood, and on indices of bone microarchitecture at 6-7 years of age I
- Investigate whether these relationships are modified by clinical, genetic or epigenetic factors.
- Establish characteristics and barriers associated with the uptake of vitamin D supplementation among pregnant women that may inform targeted approaches to public health messages.
This project will be of interest to candidates from a wide range of backgrounds including, but not limited to, biomedical sciences, public health, statistics, clinical medicine and allied health professionals. The project will both capitalise on existing data and allow the candidate to develop a new study to understand current pregnancy supplementation use. The candidate will gain skills in study design and execution, statistical methods, scientific writing, and presentation. They will develop specific understanding of musculoskeletal phenotypic methods such as DXA and HRpQCT, together with the knowledge and skills necessary to incorporate the existing genetic and epigenetic markers into the analyses.
