COMBINE

The COMBINE study will improve our understanding of how diet and gut microbiome composition influences healthy growth and neurological development in early childhood.

What is COMBINE?

COMBINE is an observational study of nutrition, growth and neurological development in children from birth to 2 years. The aim of COMBINE is to examine associations of early nutrition, feeding behaviour and early life events with growth, lean and fat mass accrual as well as neurological development to better understand the factors that promote healthy growth and development in babies. COMBINE aims to address questions arising from our Cork BASELINE birth cohort study by conducting more frequent and detailed clinical, nutritional and developmental assessments over the first 24-month of life.

Assessment Tests

Our research psychologists work as part of the COMBINE team. Children recruited to the study are assessed in a number of ways for our research.

  • Visual Habituation Task
  • The goal of the visual habituation task is to record the speed at which the child reduces responsiveness (habituates) to a stimulus indicating a level of information processing.
  • Free-play Attention Task
  • The goal of the Distractibility task is to record several indictors of how easily a child’s attention is disrupted by a series of experimentally controlled distractor events while the child is playing with different toys.
  • The Bayley Scales of Infant and Toddler Development
  • The Bayley Scales of Infant and Toddler Development is a standard series of measurements used to assess the development of infants and toddlers, ages 1–42 months.