University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus

ADOPT

Accumulating Data to Optimally Predict obesity Treatment Core Measures

What is the goal of the ADOPT Core Measures Project?

The long-term goal of the Accumulating Data to Optimally Predict obesity Treatment (ADOPT) Core Measures Project is to better understand the well-documented individual differences in response to a wide range of obesity treatments. These differences are likely due to a combination of behavioral, biological, environmental, and psychosocial factors. Yet, we currently lack the data to comprehensively identify the underlying factors and examine how they interact to influence response to treatments.

As a first step, the ADOPT Project identified a standard set of about 50 Core Measures, or factors, that can be analyzed across studies to better understand the variation in response to obesity treatments. The ADOPT Project encourages and facilitates the consistent use of these Core Measures in future clinical trials to treat obesity in adults. The goal is to have consistent use and analysis of these Core Measures to create datasets. These datasets can then be used in pooled analyses and meta-analyses to investigate how these Core Measures contribute to individual differences in response to obesity treatments.

These analyses can address such questions as:

How do psychosocial, environmental, and biological factors affect how well a person adheres to behavioral strategies promoted in obesity intervention trials?
How does sleep duration and quality of sleep influence eating patterns and physical activity through circadian rhythms, mood, or both?
Does weight loss from restricting calories lead to biological and psychosocial responses that increase the rewarding effects of food?

Ultimately, these data can inform the design and delivery of a precision medicine, or a personalized approach to obesity treatment.

Why is the ADOPT Core Measures Project important?

Developing a precision approach to obesity treatment poses significant challenges because treatments that are considered successful are not always effective for everyone, and few factors have been found to reliably predict success. One important reason is that we lack datasets with most or all of the potential factors that can account for the observed differences in response to obesity treatments and that also span the behavioral, biological, environmental, and psychosocial domains. The ADOPT Project is a significant first step toward addressing this challenge.

Collection of data on these Core Measures spanning the four interdisciplinary domains should help researchers better describe how the factors work together to impact obesity treatment responses.

Learn more about the rationale and process for developing the ADOPT Core Measures Project external link.

How does the ADOPT Core Measures Project contribute to scientific discovery?

The ADOPT Core Measures Project provides detailed information on the measures in a publicly available resource, called the Grid-Enabled Measures (GEM) external link. GEM provides researchers access to supporting information on the ADOPT Core Measures Project and facilitates interdisciplinary collaboration across the four ADOPT Project research discipline domains. The resource also serves as a forum for researchers to share their practical experiences with implementing the measures in their clinical trials.

The ADOPT Core Measures Project addresses many of the objectives, compelling questions, and critical challenges identified in the 2016 NHLBI Strategic Vision, particularly those related to investigating factors that account for individual differences in health, pathobiology, and responses to treatment.

More information

The NHLBI and other NIH Institutes and Centers have released funding opportunity announcements that support the addition of measures to new or existing clinical trials.