Dr Nikhil Tandon
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Dr Nikhil Tandon is Professor and Head of the Department of Endocrinology and Metabolism at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS). He has worked within the public healthcare system of India for 25 years as a clinician-researcher specializing in cardio-metabolic disease, and also at the interface between basic sciences and clinical/public health sciences. His research group has conducted large scale epidemiology studies in children and adults evaluating the prevalence of cardio-metabolic risk factors and their associations. Of note, he was one of the founding investigators of the CARRS Cohort, a population-based cohort in two Indian metropolitan cities evaluating cardiometabolic risk and incident disease. These studies have evaluated a range of biomarkers, performed exploratory metabolomic analysis, and created a substantial biorepository. Similarly, his work in the field of childhood obesity genetics has revealed strong associations with inflammatory pathway and adipocytokine genes.
In the field of clinical intervention studies, we have been involved in innovative use of technology and quality improvement strategies to facilitate care delivery for people with diabetes and hypertension, keeping in mind the resource constraints of a country like India, but with scope for generalizability in other economies. These strategies include but are not restricted to use of a care coordinator, decision support software, clinic flow modifications, opportunistic screening and task shifting for non-physician health care providers. To these ends, he has participated in the leadership of several intervention studies focused on improving care at health care facilities. These studies include the ongoing Integrated Tracking, Referral, Electronic Decision Support and Care Coordination (I-TREC) for hypertension and diabetes; mPower Heart Study; the CARRS Translation Trial; SimCard study; the INDEPENDENT trial; and mWELLCARE.
His group has also been working in the area of diabetes prevention in women with a prior history of gestational diabetes, and have just completed the largest study largest study, evaluating the role of a lifestyle intervention, in preventing diabetes in more than 1600 women with a prior history of GDM, across 19 sites in Bangladesh, India and Sri Lanka
He has served on several WHO Expert Groups including those for updating the “WHO Definition, Diagnosis and Classification of Diabetes Mellitus and Intermediate Hyperglycaemia” and the “WHO South East Asia NCD Regional Technical Advisory Group (NCD-RTAG)”, and more recently on the recently constituted WHO Technical Advisory Group on Diabetes (TAG/D).
At the national level in India, he is a member of governmental advisory committees to develop guidelines for chronic disease care in India and committees to use information technology to improve care in the primary healthcare system. He chairs the Technical Advisory Group of the ICMR Young Diabetes Registry, and is a Member of the Technical Advisory Group for the National Programme for the Prevention and Control of Cancer, Diabetes, CVD and Stroke.
