Grant: Team Grant: Clinician-Investigator Teams in Obstetrics & Maternal-Fetal Medicine

The rising incidence of non-communicable diseases (NCD), including diabetes, hypertension and obesity, remains one of the greatest challenges to global health. The incidence of NCD in pregnancy mirrors this global pattern, and has a major impact on short- and long-term maternal and infant health, including preterm birth, fetal growth restriction and perinatal mortality, as well as predisposition of the infant to future obesity, diabetes and cardiovascular disease. Unfortunately, information regarding the optimal management of pregnancies complicated by NCD is lacking. Studies on the management of these pregnancies requires large-scale collaborative efforts to identify risk factors for adverse outcomes and to evaluate the impact of interventions on maternal and neonatal outcome in pregnancies complicated by NCD. Our aim is to establish a multi-disciplinary research team that will utilize a unique infrastructure of an existing obstetrical research network to improve maternal and neonatal health in pregnancies complicated by NCD. The Southern Ontario Obstetric Network (SOON) is a unique, recently established, network of 9 academic and 11 non-academic hospitals that account for over 60,000 births per year, and is committed to sharing resources, data and knowledge to create best practices/guidelines and conduct research. We plan to use this platform in order to conduct a series of studies that will address the following questions: 1) Assess the impact of NCD on preterm birth and maternal and neonatal health; 2) Identify risk factors for preterm birth and adverse pregnancy outcome in pregnancies complicated by NCD, 3) Identify knowledge gaps and variation in care of pregnancies complicated by NCD; and 4) Explore the ability of medical and educational interventions to improve maternal and neonatal outcome in pregnancies complicated by NCD.