An Interdisciplinary Strategy for Obesity

The escalating prevalence of obesity and its consequences is a serious and unresolved challenge. Obesity prevention and treatment have had limited success to date, in part because interventions have focused on isolated factors and adopted a “one size fits all” approach. This project's research team hypothesizes that obesity must be addressed within a complex, individualized system of proximate and distal biological and environmental factors using an intensive interdisciplinary approach. To be effective, such an approach requires coalescing scientists and practitioners who specialize in obesity from a broad range of perspectives and providing them with a fertile environment and infrastructure to synergize their expertise with that of investigators from other key disciplines.

The long-term goal of this interdisciplinary strategy is to define effective interventions for prevention and treatment of obesity. This NIH Roadmap planning grant builds on the collaborative environment at UNC that includes departments in the Schools of Public Health and Medicine, Allied Health Sciences, the College of Arts and Sciences, and NIH-funded Centers that are addressing the obesity epidemic, including the Clinical Nutrition Research Center, Carolina Population Center, the Center for Environmental Health Sciences and the Lineberger Cancer Center. The project's goal is to engage researchers from disciplines such as: nutrition, epidemiology, health behavior, urban planning, health economics, physiology, psychology, genetics, and clinical medicine to develop the Inter-disciplinary Obesity Center (IDOC). The IDOC includes leading scholars organized in seven overlapping topical clusters who are meeting on a regular basis to develop a common language, identify needs, and design and plan specific research projects to achieve the Aims of the grant. In addition, the UNC administration has committed to develop the mechanisms to overcome barriers to interdisciplinary programs so investigators can have the resources, time, and space to achieve the goals of this project.

The Specific Aims are:

(1) Involve scientists with diverse perspectives and provide them with a fundamental, shared knowledge base to focus on an integrated strategy for obesity.

(2) Build an interdisciplinary framework for the etiology, prevention, and treatment of obesity.

(3) Identify methodological advances needed to accelerate obesity research (biomarkers, outcome measures, assessment tools, genetic assessment, environmental assessment, mathematical models, etc.).

Apply the knowledge gained from this interdisciplinary research will advance the long term goal of developing novel treatment and prevention interventions for obesity.

Principal Investigator: Barry M. Popkin

CPC Fellow Investigators: Penny Gordon-Larsen

Other Investigators: Cynthia Bulik, Marilie Gammon, Joyce Harp, Barbara Rimer, June Stevens, Patrick Sullivan

Funding Source: NIH

Grant Number: P20 RR020649

Funding Period: 09/28/04-07/31/09

Affiliated Research Projects:
• IDOC - Inter-Disciplinary Obesity Center