LTRI researchers secure $2M grant to advance global study on cardiometabolic health in women and children

Recognizing that pregnancy presents unique metabolic challenges with long-term health implications for both mother and child, the Healthy Life Trajectories Initiative (HeLTI) is exploring whether healthy lifestyle interventions around the time of pregnancy can reduce future disease risk. With almost 22,000 women recruited from across Canada, China, India, and South Africa, HeLTI could transform the health of mothers and babies during pregnancy and for years to come. 

Discover how HeLTI is working to improve health from the very start—before life even begins.

Now a team led by Dr. Ravi Retnakaran, a Clinician Scientist at LTRI, Drs. Stephen Lye and Rayjean Hung, both Senior Investigators at LTRI, has received a $ 2 million Team Grant from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) to investigate the diversity of responses in the HeLTI South Africa study. 

On the team are also Sinai Health’s endocrinologist Dr. Sheila Holmes, who specializes in pregnancy and education, clinical nurse specialist Violeta Nikolova and experts from the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. The team is strategically built as a research co-design, comprised of endocrinologists, population health experts, physiologists, laboratory medicine specialists, nursing, and patient advocates to ensure that research is collaboratively shaped by clinical expertise and lived experience. 

“For many women, the weight gained in pregnancy can increase their risk of developing diabetes and heart disease in the future. In addition, her health before, during, and after pregnancy can consequently have developmental impacts on her child,” said Dr. Retnakaran, who specializes in gestational diabetes and holds the Boehringer Ingelheim Chair in Beta-cell Preservation, Function and Regeneration. Dr. Retnakaran is also Professor of Medicine at the University of Toronto.

CIHR funding will support the team in identifying blood-based biomarkers that predict which women are most likely to benefit from lifestyle interventions like diet and exercise. Involving 6,360 South African women, the study compares a standard care to an eight-year healthy lifestyle intervention spanning pre-pregnancy to five years after birth. Using advanced proteomics, metabolomics, and lipidomics, which measure the levels of different proteins, small molecules and fat molecules, respectively, the team will uncover diverse biomarkers and how they relate to individual responses. The findings will help develop new methods for identifying and reducing risk of pre-diabetes or diabetes.

“In HeLTI, we are intervening around pregnancy, because we are trying to change the adverse programming of developmental pathways in that child that is going to determine whether they develop diabetes and heart disease 50 years later. And now with the CIHR Team grant, we will be able to unravel the diversity of response in participating women”.

The leaders of HeLTI say that the findings will produce high-quality data that will inform public health policy in Canada and around the world.