Research Areas
The Tropical Metabolism Research Unit (TMRU)
The Tropical Metabolism Research Unit (TMRU) has a Clinical Research Facility (CRF) consisting of a patient ward, clinical research rooms, research kitchen for preparation of test meals and treatment room for minor clinical procedures.
The TMRU ward is an eight bed facility for the inpatient care of children with severe undernutrition and a two-bed (expandable to 5) short stay inpatient facility for Clinical Trials.
The clinical research rooms include:
- a multifunctional room used for training of research personnel or large scale qualitative interviews
- a secure room housing a dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry (DXA) instrument (GE Hologic)
- one room for pulmonary function testing (PFT) and indirect calorimetry (Oxymax)
- a cardiovascular room with Vivid I BT11 echo/ultrasound (GE Healthcare) and three treadmills
- a vascular room equipped with a laser Doppler instrument (MoorLDI2 laser Doppler) for measurement of microvascular flow in skin
- two infusion rooms for the performance of clamp experiments, stable isotope metabolic experiments and pharmacological infusions as well as
- A clinical consultation room for interviews and anthropometric measurements. This clinical consultation room is also used to care for cohort follow-up visits, clinical trial follow-up visits, persons with nutritional disorders and is wired to allow electronic data capture.
The Sickle Cell Unit (SCU)
The Sickle Cell Unit (SCU) operates a Clinic dedicated to the care of patients with all types of Sickle cell disease (SCD). The clinic has four consultation rooms, an eight bed observation day ward, a leg ulcer dressing room, three clinical research laboratory rooms for interviews and research measurements, a haematology laboratory, a waiting room, a multimedia teaching centre, and office spaces for the Unit’s team of physicians, nurses, a health educator and administrative and secretarial support. The clinic has an electronic patient management system and all patient information is stored in a secure database allowing for data access. This patient management system is written in oracle version 6 and utilizes a client/server model.
