Helping people with idiopathic intracranial hypertension manage their weight

Idiopathic intracranial hypertension (IIH) is a condition where the pressure inside the head becomes too high for no clear reason. It can cause symptoms such as:

• Headaches
• Blurred or double vision
• Hearing a pulsing sound in the ears

If left untreated, the increased pressure can damage the optic nerve and lead to permanent sight loss.

Obesity is the most common risk factor for developing this condition. Losing weight often reduces symptoms and may sometimes relieve them altogether. However, people affected by IIH often have a history of disordered eating, poor mental health and trauma. This makes weight management more challenging.

Project aims

We want to explore whether offering psychological support within a weight management progammme could lead to better results for people with IIH.

This isn’t something that is routinely offered within NHS weight management services available to people with IIH.

We want to better understand how psychological and behavioural factors may influence the health and wellbeing of people with IIH, and whether addressing these factors could improve their outcomes.

What we hope to achieve

Gaining an understanding of how mental health impacts IIH will help us understand how the disease could be managed.

We hope to undertake additional research to test our person-centred approach to weight management in IIH.

This PhD project is being led by Matthew Handoko with supervision provided by Karen Coulman, Julian Hamilton-Shield, Denize Atan from the University of Oxford and Natalia Lawrence from the University of Exeter.