Fancy volunteering in a nutrition study and being part of world-leading research? This is an opportunity to help develop future clinical research into pelvic cancers!

We are looking for men and women over 60 years old, and the overall goal of our study is to explore the mechanism of action of dietary fibre on the gut microbiota. The gut microbiota includes all the small organisms that live in a healthy gut, for example bacteria. And we think that these bacteria enhance the way our body fights cancer cells. As these bacteria are influenced by what we eat, we think that adding specific dietary fibres to a cancer patients diet might help tolerate the cancer therapy better.

However, there is a long way to go before we can prove this in clinical trials and implement this in routine clinical care. The current study is the first step in our journey.

If you decide to be part of our study, we will ask you to take 3 different dietary fibre supplements for 14 days at a time. We will ask you to add these to water or orange juice and consume them twice a day. At the first and last day in which you will take the different supplements, you be invited to the Human Nutrition Unit, our study facility, for a test day.

On these test days, once you arrive in the morning, we will receive your stool sample and provide you with breakfast. After breakfast, you will be asked to fill in a questionnaire about your quality of life in the last 2 weeks, to assess the effect of the supplement on your health and wellbeing. Lastly, we will take a blood sample 5 hours after breakfast, after which the test day ends.

We will also inform about your diet with questionnaires, as your diet influences your gut microbiome. We do this using 2 different questionnaires; one enquires about your food intake in the last 3 months, the other asks you to keep a food diary to note down all the food and drinks you have consumed in the 3 days before the 6 test days. Your answers to questionnaires, and your stool and blood samples will help us better understand the role of dietary fibre in our gut.