Scientists will study the causes of physical pathologies in patients with mental disorders in Andalusia
Margarita Rivera Sánchez, from the Biosanitary Research Institute (ibs.GRANADA) and the Center for Biomedical Research in Mental Health of the University of Granada (CIBERSAM-UGR), will lead a project funded by the Seventh Framework Program of the European Union and the Foundation of American Research NARSAD
The Biosanitary Research Institute (ibs.GRANADA) and the Mental Health Biomedical Research Center of the University of Granada (CIBERSAM-UGR) will lead an ambitious research project on medical diseases in patients with mental disorders in Andalusia.
Margarita Rivera Sánchez, a researcher at the ibs.GRANADA and CIBERSAM-UGR, has obtained two prestigious scholarships, a European Marie Curie endowed with 223.000 euros, and another from the American NARSAD foundation of 65,000 dollars, and will lead this project, called Med-Psych , together with the director of the host research group, Jorge Cervilla, and Blanca Gutiérrez, director of the Psychiatric Genetics laboratory of the G06 CIBERSAM-University of Granada group.
Medical conditions, such as obesity, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease, are more prevalent in individuals with psychiatric disorders. Both types of disorders have a great impact on the quality and life expectancy of the individuals who suffer from them, as well as important global public, economic, personal and social health implications.
"The identification of shared risk factors between physical and mental illnesses could help advance knowledge of their causes, improve clinical care and design intervention and prevention strategies in the community," says Rivera.
The subsidized project is a branch of a previous epidemiological study that explores the frequency of presentation and the genetic-environmental risk factors that cause mental disorders in Andalusia.
Multidisciplinary study
Med-Psych is a multidisciplinary study that aims to obtain a better understanding of the relationship between physical problems and mental disorders by exploring both genetic and environmental risk factors. The results obtained could be extremely important, given the relative scarcity of previous studies at the epidemiological level and the high physical comorbidity of mental disorders.
This is the first NARSAD Young Investigator Award project awarded to an institution in Andalusia since the first NARSAD scholarships were awarded in 1987. With regard to the Marie Curie, of the 4.939 applications submitted throughout Europe, around 200 have been funded in the Life Sciences area.
Thus, this work is one of the two Andalusian projects that have obtained funding in the last call of the aforementioned program, the Med-Psych being the first to be awarded to a mental health project in Spain and whose results may have an application and impact on health and society.