The TOPCHILD (Transforming Obesity Prevention for CHILDren) collaboration succeeds in competitive Ideas Grant scheme

A team lead by EPOCH early- and mid-career researchers has succeeded in gaining $411,926.00 funding over 4 years in the highly competitive NHMRC Ideas Grant scheme. The scheme has an 11% success rate, and the TOPCHILD application was ranked in the highest category (top 5%).

What was this grant application about? Recent studies have aimed to prevent childhood obesity, by offering interventions to families and their children very early in life. These interventions usually address a lot of content, such as healthy diet, physical activity and TV time. But we do not currently know which components need to be covered by interventions and how they need to be delivered to different population groups to reduce childhood obesity. No individual trial alone can answer these questions, hence, we have established a collaboration of 17 trials with an estimated sample size of 8,500 participants - the TOPCHILD collaboration. This collaborative project will be a world-first to combine two innovative methodologies (behaviour change techniques and individual participant data meta-analysis) to maximise the use of existing and emerging data. Ultimately, we will open the 'black box' of complex interventions and identify components to move beyond the current one-size-fits-all intervention approach and enable policy makers to design population-specific effective interventions, tailored to characteristics such as socio-economic status.

Congratulations to chief investigators Anna Lene Seidler, Seema Mihrshahi, Rebecca Golley, Kylie Hunter, Brittany Johnson, Lisa Askie, Rachael Taylor and everyone else who was involved in this grant application!

If you are involved in a trial that may be eligible to join the TOPCHILD collaboration, or want to know more about TOPCHILD, we would love to hear from you. Please contact topchild.study@sydney.edu.au.