More than 40% of Dutch people experience mental health problems at least once in their lives. Mental illnesses affect both young and old and can have an enormous impact on sufferers and also on family members, friends and colleagues. Mental illnesses have a large societal impact.
ZonMw promotes, through several funding programmes, the early detection and identification of problems, their effective treatment, and the individualization of mental health care. We want to reduce the number of people with mental health problems, improve their quality of life and their treatment, prevent problem escalation, and avoid unnecessarily lengthy treatments.
ERANID, the European Research Area Network on Illicit Drugs, aims to improve cooperation in drug research in order to allow well-founded policy decisions, prevention and harm reduction interventions. ERANID is meant as a first step towards a longer term transnational cooperation in the field of drugs research.
Suicidal behaviour is argued to be the end result of the complex interaction between psychological, social and biological factors. Epidemiological studies resulted in a range of risk factors for suicidal behaviour, but we do not yet understand how their interaction increases the risk for suicidal behaviour. A new approach called network analysis can help us better understand this process as it allows us to visualize and quantify the complex association between many different symptoms or risk factors.
ZonMw organized a workshop on disturbed behavior during the International Conference on Integrated Care (ICIC) 2018. In our workshop we focussed on the concept of people with disturbed behavior and results form a qualitative and quantitative evaluation.
An impact study published on 13 December 2021 in the journal PLOS ONE reveals that systematic reviews increase the transparency and quality of animal research. Accordingly, systematic reviews contribute to better animal research, increase the quality of medical research and contribute to open science. In 2012, ZonMw started to fund the training, coaching and conduct of systematic reviews for animal research.
The Dutch Research Council (NWO) has awarded 89 highly promising young scientists from the ENW and ZonMw domain a Veni grant worth up to 250,000 euros. The grant provides the laureates with the opportunity to further elaborate their own ideas during a period of three years.
This publication provides a recap of the online symposium ‘Microplastics and human health research in The Netherlands’ that was held on 4 November 2021. About one hundred researchers and policymakers exchanged knowledge about the latest research results from fifteen breakthrough projects within the ZonMw research programme ‘Microplastics and Health’. Attention was also paid to MOMENTUM, Microplastics & Human Health Consortium, the new...
This article shows that the impact of nano- and microplastics on human health is still largely unknown. Follow-up research is therefore needed because for decades, people have come into contact with the small plastic particles in their living environment via the air, water and food. These small particles vary in size from nanometres to micrometres.
While the pharmaceutical, medical technologies, chemical, cosmetics and food industries are increasingly seeking solutions to improve, for example, their prediction of clinical efficacy and/or risk and safety assessments without the use of animals, the solutions are still insufficient;
Societal demand for animal-free testing is increasing and there is a need for new innovations to improve human health, a stimulation of this research field is therefore needed.
Persons with disabilities, with care needs or with psychiatric illnesses are particularly affected by the impact of the digital divide in society. The EURECO 2021 conference will focus on approaches to promote the development of equal digital participation for these vulnerable groups as well.
Do you face challenges in finding an animal-free innovation in research and industry?
Sign up for the online matchmaking event on 10 February 2021 at 13:00h CET of Create2Solve by sending an e-mail to mkmd@zonmw.nl.
