Rosemarie Dröes inaugurated as Professor of Psychosocial care for people with dementia

Last Friday, Rosemarie Dröes held her inaugural address to accept her chair in Psychosocial care for people with dementia. Professor Dröes’ chair is at the department of Nursing home Medicine of the VU University medical center. She is the head of the research program on care and support in dementia’ of the department of Psychiatry of the VU University medical center and the Regional Institute for Mental Health Services GGZ-inGeest in Amsterdam. Her research is embedded in the Quality of Care program of the EMGO Institute for Health and Care Research. Professor Dröes’ presentation clearly illustrated her past performance and future ambitions in conducting excellent research in order to develop, implement and disseminate improved dementia care practice.

A seminar by colleagues from the Center for Physical Activity and Nutrtion Research (C-Pan), Deakin University

On Friday May 21 Prof. Jo Salmon and Dr. Lukar Thornton give a seminar at the EMGO Institute for Health and Care Research. Prof. Salmon will spend her sabbatical at the institute, and Dr. Thornton was over for just a few days. EMGO+ has a successful ongoing collaboration with C-PAN. We collaborate on different The director of C-PAN, Prof. David Crawford is a visiting professor at EMGO+.
Prof. Salmon’s presentation is on ‘Standing up for children's health: reducing children's sedentary time at school and home’, while Lukar Thornton will speak about ‘Current approaches to measurements of food environments and some approaches for the future’.

A course on mediation analysis within the ENERGY project

In behaviour nutrition and physical activity research the focus is more and more on indentifying the interplay between different behavioral determinants, i.e. on indentifying the causal pathways from more distal to more proximal determinants to health behaviors and health outcomes. In health behaviour change intervention research, the focus is more and more on why, i.e. through what causal pathways interventions work or not.

To answer such research questions, mediation analysis is key. Within the “EuropeaN Energy balance Research to prevent excessive weight Gain among Youth” (ENERGY)-project, such analyses are a main focus to indeed identify the mediating pathways of determinants of energy balance-related eating and physical activity behaviors, and the mediating path ways through which energy-balance interventions have their effects. Today, Drs. Maartje van Stralen and Saskia te Velde and Mine Yildrim, MSc led a workshop to introduce the ENERGY researchers in mediation analyses. The introductory course was attended by colleagues from the Netherlands, Norway, Belgium and Australia.

EGEA conference: A conference on promotion of fruits and vegetables

From Wednesday to this Friday a conference was held in Brussels on the role of fruits and vegetables in pursuing the social and health benefits of a balanced diet. This is the 6th so-called EGEA conference on this topic, supported by the European Commission. I had the honour and pleasure to give the opening key note on the role of socio-economic determinants in promoting fruits and vegetables. I especially used results of the Pro Children, Schoolgruiten, and Pro Greens studies to illustrate the socio-economic disparities and the potential to address these with school-based fruit and vegetable promotion programs.

During the rest of the conference evidence was presented on the associations of fruit and vegetable intakes with morbidity and mortality, on different health promotion schemes to encourage fruits and vegetables, on physical, social and economical influences on fruit and vegetable intakes, and on European Commission research an policy projects on fruit and vegetable promotion.

More than 100 university professors plead in favour of sustainable agriculture in the Netherlands

In 2001 a Dutch governmental advisory committee led by Herman Wijffels, recommended to initiate and implement drastic changes in Dutch agriculture and livestock raising. Their report was a strong advise to move to a more sustainable system, also taking animal welfare much more into account. A movement towards a true sustainable system, with a stronger focus on quality instead of further growth in production was recommended. The minister at the time, Laurens-Jan Brinkhorst, accepted announced he would take the advice at heart, calling the advise and recommended changes “clear, hard, and inevitable”. Brinkhorst stated that the Netherlands would take an international lead in developing a more animal friendly and societal acceptable farming system, and many of the changes were supposed to be implemented or at least ongoing in 2010.

Now it is 2010, governments and ministers of agriculture have changed, we have had, amongst others, the threat of a H1N1 flu epidemic, we have a Q-fever epidemic in part of the Netherlands, recently very alarming findings have been communicated regarding antibiotic resistant bacteria among people exposed to antibiotic overloaded live stock.

And agriculture and farming have not made the changes recommended in 2001 and embraced by the minister at the time.

A group of more than 100 university professors from a variety of disciplines now ask for action. In a letter in the national news paper NRC Handelsblad of April 28 the plead for a true change towards sustainable agriculture, raising of livestock and farming methods for reasons of (1) environmental protection, climate change prevention, and food security; and (2) public health.

The full letter with argumentation is published on line which included the list of 'authors', and the NRC article, which is a shorter version, can be accessed via the NRC website.

Dr. Irma Verdonck accepts her chair in Cancer Research with a specific focus on ‘living with cancer’

Yesterday Dr. Irma Verdonck gave her inaugural address on ‘Living with Cancer’ to accept her endowed chair on behalf of the Alpe D’Huzes foundation, a charity that organizes cycling events to raise money for cancer research, especially to improve long-term perspectives for cancer patients.
Dr. Verdonck presented her plans to build a large cohort study of cancer patients to get better insights in the associations between living with cancer and mental health, as well as to build and research an e-health system to better promote psychosocial health among cancer survivors. Her chair is embedded in the EMGO Institute for Health and Care Research, and she will work closely, in a joint research program, with the CCA-V/Ici cancer research institute of the VU University Medical Center.

The annual meeting of the EMGO Institute for Health and Care Research

Last Thursday we had the annual meeting of the EMGO Institute for Health and Care Research at 'Pakhuis de Zwijger'. Our guest Prof. Ronald Stolk of the Groningen University Medical Center, was the first speaker. He introduced the LifeLines project to the EMGO community. LifeLines is a cohort study in a large representative sample of the population of the northern provinces of the Netherlands, covering three generations. The main objective is to unravel the interaction between genetic and environmental factors in the development of multifactorial diseases, their concurrent development in individuals and their complications as a complex trait. The rest of the morning program was devoted to our own cohort studies, i.e. the Twin Registry, Nesda & Nesdo, Lasa, CheckIt, ABCD, Hoorn and AGGO; studies covering the whole life course from newly born infants to the very old. These cohort studies were presented, each in 5 minutes, and afterwards we worked on new research plans on further exploiting these cohorts, preferably combining more than one of the EMGO cohort studies.
In the afternoon the four research programs of the institute met in separate parallel sessions. At the end of the day, the junior researchers who had received a travel grant in the past year, and the researchers who received an EMGO fellowship in the past year presented their research. Finally the EMGO science award and Societal Impact award were announced. Drs. Wilma Waterlander and Ingrid Steenhuis of the Department of Health Sciences received the Societal Impact Award for their studies and ministerial advice on pricing strategies to promote healthier diet. Marijn Distel received the Science Award for her paper 'The five factor model of personality and borderline personality disorder: A genetic anlaysis of comorbidity', published in Biological Psychology.