Rising rates of obesity and non-communicable diseases such as type 2 diabetes, non-alcoholic fatty liver disease and cardiovascular disease are putting enormous pressure on our health services. New interventions and treatments are needed to help us make better lifestyle choices to maintain our health and wellbeing throughout the lifecourse into older age.
The Nutrition, Endocrinology & Metabolism Group is internationally recognised for conducting interdisciplinary research to define mechanisms of conditions including obesity, diabetes, fatty liver disease and cardiovascular disease and translating these findings into novel therapies and preventive approaches with real world clinical impact. The nutrition group is also recognised internationally for ground-breaking research that harnesses genetically modified plants to facilitate environmentally sustainable strategies to improve human nutrition and for research into the interactions between nutrients and the epigenome.
The Group incorporates the metabolism and functionality of fatty acids, nutritional immunology and nutritional epigenetics within its research portfolio and covers both early life nutrition and diagnosing and meeting the nutritional challenges in older people. Other areas of expertise include immunometabolism, metabolomics and the microbiome, and the nutritional determinants of resilience and response to therapy in Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease, cancer and Crohn’s Disease.
The research programme is translational, linking pre-clinical science discoveries to clinical treatment and management, and to public health, and government policy. Research within the Group is embedded within the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) Southampton Biomedical Research Centre and specifically in the Nutrition, Lifestyle & Metabolism Theme. There are strong links within the Group to Critical care, Musculoskeletal and Respiratory medicine, Oncology, Hepatology, Cardiology, Surgery, Psychiatry, Paediatrics, Geriatric Medicine and Primary Care amongst others.
The Group has a life course perspective with long-standing partnerships with the MRC Lifecourse Epidemiology Centre, for example, examining and understanding nutritional influences on maternal, infant and childhood outcomes measured as part of the Southampton Women’s Survey. Our researchers also work with the Maternal and Child Physiology Group, supporting nutritional interventions in both animal models and man; the Global Heath Group (with much global health research being related to nutritional exposures); the Epigenetics Group and the Cardiology Group.