Future research demands of the United European Gastroenterology (UEG) and its member societies

Abstract

Aims: The purpose of this study was to initiate and stimulate collaborative research efforts to support United European Gastroenterology Federation (UEG) member societies facilitating digestive health research in European on the one hand and, on the other hand, to increase EU-funded digestive health research by providing evidence and advice to funding bodies on priority areas. The UEG Research Committee initiated a survey of the current and future research interests of each individual UEG ordinary member society (specialist societies).

Methods: A questionnaire was sent by mail to 17 UEG ordinary member societies asking them to specify research demands related to the most urgent medical need including basic science research, translational research, clinical research, patient management research and research on disease prevention, in an open fashion but with limited word count.

Results: The responses from 13 societies were analysed in a semi-quantitative and in a qualitative way, and were clustered into five domains with two aspects each that were consented and shared between three and seven of the responding 13 societies. These clusters resemble topics such as 'Hot topics' (e.g. life-style, nutrition, microbial-host interaction), Biomarkers (genetic profiling, gut-brain interaction), Advanced technology (artificial intelligence, personalised medicine), Global research tools (bio-banking, EU trials), and Medical training (education, prevention).

Conclusion: The generated topic list allows both collaboration between individual specialist societies as well as initiating and fostering future research calls at the EU level and beyond when approaching stakeholders.

Keywords: Gastroenterology; demand; questionnaire; research; specialist.

Figure 1.

Example of the qualitative analysis of answers, here for Question 1 and 4. (a) All answers of all societies to Question 1, with the raw answers (left), answers identified as society-specific (middle, yellow), and topics that occur in more than one societies’ statement (right, marked in different colours); (b) The same sorting for Question 4 where society-specific topics were not identified, but three topics for more than two societies.