Who are we?

Scientists from the Epidemiology & Public Health group, Department of Clinical & Biomedical Science, Faculty of Health & Life Sciences, University of Exeter, UK.

We collaborate with clinicians with expertise in diagnosing and treating haemochromatosis, with the aim to better understand the disease and to help patients with HFE gene variants, by finding the most accurate information. We created http://ex.ac.uk/ironoverload to share our findings with patients.

Funding & disclosures

We have received funding from the NIHR (Dr Atkins was awarded an Advanced Fellowship in 2021 to study factors leading to haemochromatosis diagnosis) and the UK MRC (Prof Melzer was awarded a grant in 2019 to study iron overload and ageing).

We have no competing relationships or activities to declare that could have influenced the submitted work. The funders had no input in the study designs; in the collection, analysis, and interpretation of data; in the writing of the reports; or in the decision to submit our articles for publication. The researchers acted independently from the study sponsors in all aspects of the studies. Our results are all published in peer reviewed journals. No NHS, government agency, or private business has ever told us to change anything in our reports. We don’t sell genetic tests, take membership fees, or see patients. All the estimates reported on this site are at the group level, describing the risk of disease on average, in individuals of European genetic ancestry. Many other factors, especially age, sex, alcohol use, and diet, also impact an individual’s disease risk. We cannot make individual clinical recommendations.