Approved Research

ADMISSION UK Multimorbidity Research Collaborative on Multiple Long-Term Conditions: from burden and inequalities to underlying mechanisms

Lay summary

Living with multiple long-term health conditions is common and important for both patients and for the NHS (National Health Service). The way we deliver health services in the NHS is not ideally suited to care for people with multiple long-term conditions. To prevent people from acquiring multiple long-term conditions and to provide the best care to people with multiple long-term conditions we urgently need to better understand how to prevent and treat different groups of long-term health conditions that tend to occur together, known as clusters of long-term conditions.

As part of our 4 year collaborative programme of research, funded by the Medical Research Council and National Institute for Health Research we plan to use data from UK Biobank to address this need by:

1) establishing how the area where a person lives and other socio-demographic factors are linked with different clusters of long-term conditions. We will also look at whether lifestyle factors such as diet and exercise that may have a role in explaining any links we find

2) gaining new understanding of what processes lead to the development of different clusters of long-term conditions, using the genetic data available in UK Biobank.

This work will lead to the development of robust evidence that will provide the basis for novel public health, policy and biopsychosocial interventions to prevent, treat and mitigate the consequences of different clusters of long-term conditions.