A consortium of Universities and innovation partners has been awarded £5.4 million from UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) to run a programme of trials in the food system to evaluate interventions that aim to support healthier and more sustainable diets. The research has been funded via the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC). The SALIENT […]

In this article originally published in The Conversation, GDAR scientists Dr Gabriel Okello, and Dr Meelan Thondoo discuss strategies that individuals, communities and policy makers can adopt to reduce the threat posed by air pollution in African cities. Rapid urbanisation in Africa is worsening air pollution levels. There are economic as well as health consequences. […]

Researchers have developed a novel way to detect whether a person follows a Mediterranean diet using a blood test and used it to show that a Mediterranean diet is associated with lower risk of type 2 diabetes. Unit PhD student Jakub Sobiecki and colleagues present their findings today in the open access journal PLOS Medicine. […]

MRC Epidemiology Unit researchers are participating in a new National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) project that is investing £2.9 million into new research in the Caribbean, Pacific and Philippines that aims to improve population nutrition through ecologically sustainable local food production. The NIHR Global Health Research Group on Community Food for Human […]

Unit researchers have joined colleagues at the University of Cambridge Faculty of Education and Bond University in Australia to call on scientific journals to amend their submission guidelines in a new commentary published today in Trials.  Their call comes after their analysis identified numerous research studies evaluating complex interventions that had been published with crucial […]

Fertility is influenced by mechanisms that influence both reproductive biology and human behaviour, according to the largest study to date identifying genetic determinants of the number of children an individual may have. The study, led by researchers at the Universities of Cambridge, Oxford and Pennsylvania, also identified a region of the human genome that has […]

One in ten early deaths could be prevented if everyone managed at least half the recommended level of physical activity, say a team led by researchers at the MRC Epidemiology Unit. In research published today in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, the researchers say that 11 minutes a day (75 minutes a week) of […]

New research has identified hundreds of proteins that might contribute to the onset of common, chronic metabolic diseases such as type 2 diabetes, and consequently pathways to potential treatments. The study, published in Nature Metabolism, was led by an international research team from the MRC Epidemiology Unit, the Precision Healthcare University Research Institute (PHURI) at […]

Researchers – led by Dr Haneen Khreis at the MRC Epidemiology Unit at the University of Cambridge – have created an interactive systematic evidence map of urban policy interventions to reduce traffic-related emissions and air pollution. Researchers, practitioners and policymakers can use this resource to discover more about the effectiveness of over 1000 policy scenarios, […]

In this The Conversation UK article Dr Meelan Thondoo, who works on the GDARspaces project at the MRC Epidemiology Unit, joins Professor Mark Nieuwenhuijsen and PhD researcher Tamara Iungman of Barcelona Institute for Global Health (ISGlobal), to discuss evidence from their new research examining if increasing tree coverage can reduce premature deaths caused by high temperatures in […]