Project Grant R01DK148893

The National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases awarded Pennington Biomedical Research Center $731,916 on August 10, 2026, under the Diabetes, Digestive, and Kidney Diseases Extramural Research program (CFDA 93.847) to conduct a prospective longitudinal study characterizing infant energy balance from one to twelve months of age.

The study will enroll 100 healthy infants and assess them at one, three, six, nine, and twelve months using gold-standard methods adapted for infants. Researchers will objectively measure energy intake using the intake-balance method and quantify free-living total daily energy expenditure, sedentary energy expenditure, and physical activity energy expenditure. Assessments will integrate physiological biomarkers (T3, leptin, epinephrine), behavioral factors (feeding patterns, milk type, timing of complementary foods, accelerometry), and developmental milestones to identify drivers of accelerated versus appropriate growth. The research addresses the gap in longitudinal energy balance phenotyping data; current infant energy intake reference standards rely on decades-old data and produce mean prediction errors of 16 percent, reaching up to 71 percent in some cases, leading to unintentional overfeeding during a critical window of metabolic programming in infants one to three months old.

Performance occurs in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, with a period of performance through April 30, 2031. Pennington Biomedical Research Center is a Louisiana State University-affiliated research institution.