Bocking - early data examples

Examples people are looking at are: ‘How does the season of birth affect the pregnancy development, and pregnancy outcomes?’ We know that Seasonal Affective Disorder affects many people and pregnant women are not excluded from that. So that’s an area that we’re interested in looking in and looking at how that affects the placenta. We’re doing these studies with Dr. Robert Levitan who’s a psychiatrist at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health here in Toronto. So that’s an example of a multidisciplinary project bringing together psychiatrists, obstetricians, physiologists, molecular biologists, education people; that’s one example. Another one is looking at telomeres. So telomeres are parts of our chromosomes that as we get older they get shorter.  And we know that impacts on healthy development – or negatively. One of our colleagues, Dr. Julia Knight and Dr. Andersen are looking at, through Cancer Care Ontario, looking at telomere lengths in women who have been enrolled in the Ontario Birth Study. Too early to say, but those are just two examples of the types of things that this research platform provides, basically you know the; it’s open for anything really, to be able to study and, and look at the effects of either physical, mental or educational readiness.