NETHERLANDS HOPES TO COLLABORATE WITH UAE ON OBESITY SOLUTIONS
▶ From dementia and cancer treatment to genetics, Dutch researchers have been tackling health from several different, often digital, angles
Personalised medicine, medical devices, robotics and e-health are just some of the solutions to the healthcare problems of today and tomorrow that the Netherlands plans to export to the UAE.
In the city of Nijmegen, the heart of the country’s Health Valley, the Dutch have been tackling health from different digital angles, from obesity and cancer treatment to genetics.
“There are a lot of changes in the healthcare sector and, more and more, there is attention on prevention and health instead of sick people and treatment,” said Chris Doomernik, Health Valley’s managing director.
“Attention for prevention is increasing and it’s a good development. We see in the healthcare sector that treatment and diagnostics are becoming more and more personalised and the voice of the patient is becoming louder.”
Health care has to be more tailored to patients’ needs and offer more comfortable treatments. More services must be delivered and all these developments demand the need for innovation in health care.
“We speed up innovation in health care to improve the sector and make it more accessible and affordable,” Mr Doomernik said.
“We want to encourage economic activity and growth.”
A few examples he gave include the Gable Gait and Balance Robot, a step-and-balance training system for patients who have suffered a stroke.
The robot helps them to walk again, works on rehabilitation and makes the process more effective because it is less labour-intensive.
“You don’t have to work with two or three physiotherapists for each patient because this device gives them support,” Mr Doomernik said.
The Tessa robot is designed to assist people with dementia – it helps to make them more independent of their healthcare workers so they can make a shopping list, play music or be supported in other ways.
The lab-on-a-chip technology developed by LioniX is used to create new diagnostics in drugs for treatments such as cancer therapies.
The Habit Agency, an e-health company, also developed an app to change the lifestyle of patients, helping to teach them healthy habits as it communicates with their doctor.
The foundation is also working on personalised medicine, medical devices and robotics, e-health, and the construction of cure and care homes – issues they feel will offer solutions to the healthcare issues of today and tomorrow.
“A care organisation for the disabled called Siza wants to build a new building for people to live at home using technology to stay as independent as they can,” Mr Doomernik said.
“They’re convinced it’s useful for people to do as much self-management as possible without the use of healthcare providers.”
Medical experts believe people enjoy a better quality of life when they stay at home rather than being in hospital.
A team from Health Valley met Fuzan Al Khalidi, the director of healthcare strategy and policy at the Prime Minister’s Office in Dubai, in 2016, along with other care institutions. They discussed e-health solutions as companies prepare to upgrade their systems.
“The UAE is one of the top 10 most obese countries [in the region], with 23 per cent of those aged 20 or over deemed overweight,” said Dr Egar van Mil, a paediatric endocrinologist at the Obesity Lifestyle Intervention Centre at Jeroen Bosch Hospital.
“Amsterdam is one of the few cities in the world that has been able to lower its obesity rate.”
According to the World Health Organisation, the UAE is seventh in the ranking of obese countries in the Middle East.
“We’re used to eating until we are full,” Dr van Mil said. “We know how to survive starvation but not the obesity epidemic.”
He works on cognitive behavioural and gene therapy to find ways to tackle the issue.
“We are working on a therapy with Berlin now where we have an agent that is capable of stimulating the relatively deficient receptor that is the problem in this type of obesity,” he said.
“It’s a breakthrough in terms of a medical therapy in children with monogenetic obesity, but it’s a very small part of the field of obese patients.”
Changing the environment is also key. “Obesity is a normal reaction to an obesogenic environment,” Dr van Mil said.
“We’re not capable of changing the environment – in the UAE it’s so hard, but you have to learn how to live in it and be smarter than it.”
Obesity is a normal reaction to an obesogenic environment. But you have to be smarter than it
DR EGAR VAN MIL
Paediatric endocrinologist