A new initiative to understand chronic disease in Africa has been awarded five years' funding by the Medical Research Council (MRC). The African Partnership for Chronic Disease Research (APCDR) is an international research partnership that assesses the burden and causes of non-communicable diseases such as diabetes and heart disease in sub-Saharan Africa.
This MRC funding will allow researchers from the partnership to develop a sustainable platform to share resources and skills which will help develop long-term strategies for disease control and management in sub-Saharan Africa.
As treatment and management of infectious diseases such as HIV, malaria and tuberculosis improves, medical researchers expect that non-infectious chronic diseases will become an increasingly important problem in sub-Saharan Africa. Diseases such as type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease are expected to become the leading causes of morbidity and death in this region.
The APCDR will conduct research that will provide more reliable and precise information on disease burden, underlying aetiology and strategies for intervention.
"We don't fully understand the magnitude and distribution of risk factors for these diseases in sub-Saharan Africa," says Dr Elizabeth Young, investigator from the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute. "Over the next five years, our partnership expects to collect detailed health and disease information and blood samples from over 24,000 individuals across 10 countries. This collection will generate a resource that will provide a unique framework for researchers in these countries."
In existing studies into these diseases throughout Africa, scientists have used a variety of methods and assessed only a small subset of risk factors. This small scale restricts any comparative studies across the region.
This partnership will develop the much needed, large-scale high quality comparable studies across a wide range of di
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| Contact: Aileen Sheehy press.office@sanger.ac.uk 0044-012-234-92368 Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute Source:Eurekalert |
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