Nutrition

The Children's Nutrition Research Centre (CNRC) is internationally known for its work to improve the nutritional health of children. Good nutrition is vital for growing kids, especially those with serious illnesses.

Researchers are currently studying nutrition in children with obesity, cystic fibrosis, liver disease, diabetes, inflammatory bowel disease, cancer, traumatic brain injury, cerebral palsy and asthma.

The high calibre of paediatric research conducted at the Children’s Nutrition Research Centre at the Royal Children’s Hospital has resulted in a large number of internationally-renowned advances which have influenced the way sick and injured children are now treated. The Royal Children’s Hospital houses one of the world’s best equipped Body Composition Laboratories with a wide range of state-of-the-art equipment to monitor the growth, nutritional status, rehabilitation, and energy requirements of children with various medical conditions.

How does the RCH Help?

The Royal Children’s Hospital Foundation invests more than $300,000 each year to support the work of the Children’s Nutrition Research Centre. The RCH Foundation has also funded rare and costly equipment for the centre’s Body Composition Laboratory which provides accurate and sensitive information not available in other centres. This equipment enables the Children’s Nutrition Research Centre to uphold its reputation as the leader in children’s energy expenditure and body composition research in Australia and worldwide.

Our Research Breakthroughs

Some of the major achievements of the Children’s Nutrition Research Centre since establishment in 1991 include:

• Contributing more than 250 scientific publications in the health areas of: infant nutrition; cystic fibrosis; nutritional rehabilitation in liver disease; and gastroenteritis and eating disorders which have since resulted in changes to the way children are treated throughout Queensland, interstate and even internationally.
• Developed and equipped one of the world’s leading body composition laboratories in use at the Royal Children’s Hospital, Brisbane.
• Played a key role in developing new growth children’s charts for use in Australia.
• Influenced world-wide change in clinicians’ attitudes to child health and identified new techniques for assessing body composition and energy expenditure of children.

Our hope for 2009-10 is to:

• commence a major research study into early infant feeding and diet and their effect on later outcomes such as food allergy and overweight and obesity.
• continue to expand the postgraduate training scheme to train the next generation of nutrition researchers.