CIDDRG

The Cambridge Intellectual & Developmental Disabilities Research Group at the University of Cambridge was established in 2002 with a grant awarded by The Health Foundation to run for over 15 years. Over this time, the research group was part of the Section of Developmental Psychiatry in the Academic Department of Psychiatry. The group was led by senior academics in clinical psychology, psychiatry, and sociology undertaking a range of research, often in partnership with other groups. With colleagues we led one of the clinical research themes of two consecutive NIHR’s CLAHRCs (Collaborations for Leadership in Applied Health Research and Care), the first focussing on people with learning disabilities and those with acquired brain injury and the second working with groups of people with enduring disability and/or disadvantage.

In 2017, the Health Foundation grant came to an end and with the retirement of Tony Holland and Howard Ring and changes in the Department of Psychiatry research in the field of learning disabilities has changed. Shahid Zaman, with support from Isabel Clare, now leads our research into Down’s syndrome and the risk of dementia with grants from Alzheimer’s Research-UK and the National Institutes of Health in the USA – Cambridge is part of a multidisciplinary, multi-centre longitudinal programme of research into Down’s syndrome and dementia. With support from Sam’s Foundation and from the Foundation for Prader-Willi Research studies have continued into specific aspects of Prader-Willi Syndrome. Isabel Clare works with the successor to the CLAHRC (the East of England NIHR ARC), and with the CPFT CLASS clinic. She also supervises Jodie Rawles, who is undertaking a PhD funded by the Wellcome Trust, part of a larger research project on Mental health and Justice, based at Kings College, London. She is an advisor to Jennifer Noh who is undertaking a PhD investigating how app-based technology used to collect behavioural data can be combined with the use of wearable devices (watches) to then be used as a clinical tool to investigate challenging behaviours in people with intellectual disabilities. This is in partnership with Stephen Eglen and Dina Kronhaus, in the Department of Applied Mathematics, University of Cambridge.

Over this period, the CIDDRG has been based at Douglas House, but with the Department of Psychiatry moving out of these premises and with the above changes the Down’s syndrome and dementia research is now linking closely with the dementia research group led by Professor John O’Brien and the work on Prader-Willi Syndrome is in partnership with Professor Paul Fletcher.

This website will continue to describe our work, and present our research and publications.

Achievements and future directions

The achievements we have made since the Health Foundation awarded a grant to establish The Health Foundation Chair in Learning Disa

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