Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps his Department are taking to help support the Eating Disorders Genetic Initiative UK, including to improve understanding of the genetic and environmental factors associated with such conditions and to develop more effective treatments.

The Department funds research on health and social care through the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR). The NIHR welcomes funding applications for research into any aspect of human health and care including eating disorders.

Through the NIHR, the Department directly supports the Eating Disorders Genetic Initiative UK (EDGI), which is a collaboration between King’s College London, NIHR BioResource, and the eating disorder charity Beat. EDGI is the largest study of eating disorders ever conducted in England, aiming to collect psychological, medical, and genetic information of 10,000 people with experience of an eating disorder.

The NIHR recently partnered with other mental health research funders (the Medical Research Council, Economic and Social Research Council, Arts and Humanities Research Council, and Medical Research Foundation) in a funding initiative that supports new collaborations in eating disorders research, bringing together eating disorders experts and researchers not previously involved in this field. Funded work includes studies that examine biological and environmental risk factors for eating disorders, and work that collaborates with the EDGI project.