Metabolic Proteins & Metabolites
Vision
Our goal is to achieve a step-change in UK research activity and clinical innovation within the field of Metabolic Psychiatry by establishing a new interdisciplinary research Hub focused on the interface between metabolism and severe mental illness (SMI), with three overarching objectives:
1. To drive discovery science in metabolic psychiatry.
2. To co-produce and test novel metabolism-based treatment approaches.
3. To build UK-wide capacity for metabolic psychiatry research and clinical innovation.
Why is this work important?
People with serious mental illness (SMI) have high metabolic and cardiovascular morbidity and mortality.
-
Approximately 60% of people with serious mental illness are overweight or obese and are 3 times more likely to have obesity than the general population [1].
-
People with SMI have 2 -3 times the risk of Type 2 Diabetes [2,3,4].
-
People with SMI have 2-3 times increased mortality from cardiovascular disease [5].
-
Over 70% of deaths in those with SMI in the UK occur due to preventable physical illness [6].
This is partly driven by lifestyle, diet, psychotropic medications and access to healthcare but increasing evidence from genomics [7], epigenomics [8], metabolomics [9], transcriptomics [10] and other areas of research indicate an important biological overlap between metabolic dysfunction and severe psychopathology. -
The association between metabolic dysfunction and SMI can no longer be attributed solely to side-effects of medication. 40.8% of drug-naïve patients are overweight or obese [11].
-
A significant part of the core pathophysiology of SMI may be metabolic in nature and a focus on metabolic aspects of SMI is supported by preliminary evidence of efficacy for interventions such as the ketogenic diet and metformin in SMI. [12, 13].
Through six workstreams, the hub will work to identify the underlying connections between metabolic dysfunction and SMI. And in doing so, accelerate scientific progress toward better physical and mental health for people living with SMI.