Call for transnational working groups on diet-related chronic diseases

The French National Research Agency, in partnership with 3 European countries (Belgium, Netherlands, Norway) is launching a fourth Joint Action focusing on pillar 3 ‘diet-related chronic diseases” of the Strategic Research Agenda.

The Joint Programming Initiative “A Healthy Diet for a Healthy Life” (JPI HDHL) has been established to coordinate research in the areas of food, diet, physical activity and health in order to achieve tangible societal and health impact and to strengthen European leadership and competitiveness in this field.

This rapid action call will support community-led working groups that can push forward the field of diet-related chronic diseases. The call focuses on leading scientists and experts in the field to work on conceptualization of topics in order to provide white papers, prospective views, guidelines, or best practice frameworks of value to the wider research community.

The intent of this call is to assemble motivated Working Groups of leading scientists in order to push forward the field of diet-related chronic diseases. By establishing working groups the JPI HDHL aims to support transnational cooperation and communication between individual researchers, research groups and research organisations in order to merge knowledge, data and research results. This should result in outcomes that are directly available, easy to share and have societal impact.

The JPI HDHL selected the following topics to be addressed in the Working Groups.

1.    Economic evaluation of dietary interventions and/or physical activity interventions

High healthcare costs caused by chronic diseases are a major concern in Europe and other western countries. Lifestyle interventions may prevent or delay the development of diet-related chronic diseases and therefore may contribute to lower the healthcare costs related to chronic-diseases. Unfortunately, the costs and benefits of such interventions (both the costs of the interventions itself as the downstream consequences) are currently under-investigated.

2.    Integrated chronic disease prevention and management

Integrated chronic disease prevention and management aims to reduce overall risk factors (including high blood pressure, overweight and obesity, hyperglycaemia and hyperlipidaemia) in high-risk individuals and provide good quality health care for major chronic diseases. Furthermore, integrated chronic disease prevention and management might delay the progression of present chronic diseases.

3.    Scouting exercise for existing intervention studies and explore the possibilities of merging

There are many dietary intervention studies (both national and pan-European) focusing on the overall relationship between diet and health, health promoting or disease prevention. The evaluation of such intervention studies is often difficult. JPI HDHL would like to stimulate the evaluation and the exploitation of these dietary interventions. Therefore, this topic focuses on the examination of possibilities to merge and pool dietary intervention studies.

Composition of consortia

The application must be led by a coordinator who is eligible to one of the participating funding organizations. Only transnational Working Groups will be funded: each Working Group must involve a minimum of three JPI HDHL countries; of which the coordinator and at least one other partner should be eligible for the participating funding organisations. Working Groups can include key-expertise from partners from countries outside the JPI HDHL. For reasons of transnational balance, no more than two project partners from the same country are allowed to join a Working Group.

Those working groups selected will be funded by the coordinator’s institution’s national funding agency, in compliance with said country’s national rules. If for some reason this is not possible, funding may be allocated to a partner of the working group.

A maximum grant of €50,000 will be awarded per selected Working Group over a 6-to-12month time period. Funding will cover the cost of meetings and travel required to achieve the working group’s objectives.