Lifetime Achievement Award 2025 – Dr Mike Mendall MB.BS, MA, MD, FRCP

Dr Mike Mendall MB.BS, MA, MD, FRCP
Consultant Gastroenterologist Croydon University Hospital and Honorary Senior Lecturer St George’s Hospital Medical School.

Proposer: Abdul Sultan

CONTRIBUTION TO CMS

1. When president of CMS, he made a number of innovations to move the society on from its previous format of 3 meetings a year at Shirley Oaks and the annual dinner at Chateaux Napolean. He rotated meeting venues and changed the location of the annual dinner.
2. He introduced the annual Lifetime Achievement Award
3. He is the longest serving member of the CMS committee.
4. Other innovations, such as the ‘presidential hat’ ala Colonel Gadaffi, which he handed to his successor Muti Abulafi, have not continued as Muti lost the hat!

NON-RESEARCH ACHIEVEMENTS

• He has never had a day off sick in 25 years as a consultant in Croydon which, according to average NHS rates of sickness (4% before the pandemic and now run to 8%) means that by his calculations, he has worked an entire year for free.
• As chair of the R and D committee in 2000, he played a major role in establishing and developing the R and D department at CUH and helped supervise a number of research fellows towards MDs.
• He has led the gastroenterology team for 15 years at CUH.
• He served on a number of national committees, including the British Society of Gastroenterology and the Upper GI Cancer National Cancer Intelligence Network.
• He was head of service for medicine for two stints of three years and helped modernise the service.

RESEARCH ACHIEVEMENTS

He had an active research career with more than 100 publications, including first-world reports many made whilst working at CUH. He began work as a consultant in Croydon in 1995, and continued to run a research lab whilst doing his consultant job, for a further 5 years. During this period, he raised 1.5 million pounds in grant funding.

The central theme of his research career began whilst on elective in rural Bihar, a very backward area of India, in 1984. He was struck by the small size of the children, being only 60% of WHO norms yet appearing healthy. He became interested in the possibility that chronic low-grade insults could produce qualitatively similar effects to more obvious illnesses and that these could explain the differences in growth and height. In those days, we lacked assays for various markers of inflammation sufficiently sensitive to measure levels within apparently healthy people. He spent the first part of his research career developing and exploiting such assays to demonstrate widely differing health experiences related to these small differences.

Achievements include:

• Many aspects of H. pylori transmission, including the first evidence that it was mainly transmitted in childhood (Lancet 1992) and transmitted between children at school(BMJ 1994), the latter utilising a novel test of salivary western blotting for antibodies which was developed in his lab.
• One of the first reports of the relation of CRP levels within the normal range with a wide range of cardiovascular risk factors and with cardiovascular disease itself pointing to the inflammatory basis for this and most human chronic disease (1996). This involved the development of a sensitive assay for CRP in his lab able to measure down to 0.001mg/dl.
• The first study exploring the levels and determinants of CRP levels in children (1996) demonstrated that levels in children are much lower than in adults and related to abdominal adiposity.
• He was the first to propose a possible association between Helicobacter pylori infection and coronary heart disease (1994), which he no longer fully believes himself, but which continues to receive attention from the wider research community. It has recently become of greater relevance as the appreciation of the role of gut microbiome in human disease becomes better appreciated.
• He undertook and designed one the first antibiotic intervention studies in coronary heart disease directed at two organism, Chlamydia pneumoniae and H. pylori. He believes that the study worked not because of effects on either of these two organisms, but possibly due to effects on other unspecified organisms.
• He was the first to describe the relation of serum cytokine levels with cardiovascular risk factors as a risk of cardiovascular disease (1997). This was subsequently expanded upon by other researchers and is now orthodoxy.
• He was the first to report an association between childhood affluence and antibiotic use with risk of IBS (2008).
• He performed the only randomized placebo-controlled trial of Aloe Vera in IBS.
• He also performed the only study to explore the determinants of the inflammatory response to standardized injury, which showed that baseline CRP is a marker of immune system reactivity and that it is this reactivity which explains the relation of CRP levels to death, from most forms of chronic disease.
• He has the second highest number of citations on google scholar at CUH.
• He performed a number of clinical studies in collaboration with Professor Devinder Kumar into dietary influences on Crohn’s disease activity. The main findings were the deleterious effects of red meat and eggs.
• He conducted the first study exploring the determinants of bowel inflammation as indicated by faecal calprotectin in a general population sample in Croydon in 2002. This showed that obesity, lack of fibre and lack of exercise were the main determinants and the likely link between these environmental factors and the risk of colorectal cancer.
• As a result of these findings, he went on to propose that obesity counter-intuitively was a risk factor for Crohn’s disease, performing the first study to support this. This was based on CUH IBD patients was published in 2013 and has received widespread confirmation. Following this, he had a fruitful collaboration with Professor Tine Jess in Copenhagen and was able to confirm and extend these associations in a number of Danish national datasets, leading to publication in high-profile journals.
• An observational study of the determinants of mortality amongst hospital patients during the first COVID wave from March to April 2020. This showed that obesity frailty and age were the only independent determinants of mortality, with chronic disease not playing an independent role.