Chris Hammond
Member
Chris Hammond is Frost Professor of Ophthalmology at King’s College London, within the School of Life Course Sciences. He is also Consultant Ophthalmologist at Guys and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust in London, having trained in Paediatric Ophthalmology and Strabismus at Moorfields Eye Hospital. He manages the adult ocular motility service at St Thomas’, and also provides ophthalmological input to the UK national Neurofibromatosis 1 and 2 multidisciplinary services at Guys Hospital.
Professor Hammond heads one of the leading groups examining the genetic epidemiology of common eye diseases, including glaucoma, myopia, age-related cataract, dry eye disease and age-related macular degeneration. His research is aiming to deliver personalized, predictive, preventive and participatory medicine, using Omics technology and Big Data analytics with the ultimate aim of reducing blindness and debilitating eye diseases. His research is highly collaborative, and he contributes to international consortia with data from the TwinsUK cohort, UK Biobank and local patient datasets.
As a member of its Scientific Committee, I am representing the Royal College of Ophthalmologists on the Steering Group. The RCOphth and its members, need to understand who is affected by eye disease, and where they are, to enable them to train future eye specialists to deliver eye care, and to advise the Department of Health and others about future manpower needs. The NEHS will, we hope, deliver this vital dataset for use by the many stakeholders in the UK vision care community.
"My interest in the NEHS stems from my background in research, which started (and continues) with twin studies, which have tried to examine the roles of nurture and nature in eye disease. While genetic factors explain a significant amount of variation in eye disease within a population, our work has shown there are differences in prevalence of diseases in genetically similar populations, emphasising the importance of environmental factors. Our work in myopia, using data from European Eye Epidemiology (E3) Consortium studies, has shown a strong cohort effect- myopia is becoming more common, possibly related to increased educational pressures and less time spent outdoors in childhood. It is therefore imperative that we have up-to-date information about how common eye disease is in the UK- the last population-based evidence is now over 30 years old, and it is high time we had new data."