Active clinical trials for "Asthma"

Asthma is a long term disease of the lungs. In asthma patients the sensitive airway tubes narrow in reaction to something that irritates the airways such as allergens or environmental pollutants. There is currently no cure for asthma and new medicines or combinations of medicines are needed that will be of benefit to patients particularly those with a more severe disease. Activation of certain signal molecules inside the lung cells may participate in the development of asthma and the response to allergens. Blocking these signal molecules specifically with medicines might therefore be beneficial in the treatment of asthma. In this study we want to test a new medicine that specifically targets a subset of signal molecules that are associated with the allergen response in the lung. In particular, we want to test this medicine on cells obtained from the lungs of asthma patients. Understanding the effects of this new medicine on these asthmatic lung cells will give vital information on how this new medicine works before we can test it in asthma patients.

This is a Phase 1b, randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial to evaluate the safety, tolerability, and pharmacokinetic profiles of voriconazole inhalation powder in adult subjects with well-controlled asthma. This study will involve 2 cohorts.

In addition to its impact on health, the COVID-19 pandemic led to increased unemployment and loss of employer-sponsored insurance coverage. Obtaining coverage can be challenging and eligibility for public programs and subsidies can be limited, and those who do not qualify can face steep premiums, high-deductibles, and high out-of-pocket costs. Disruptions to employment and insurance coverage during the pandemic threaten to negatively affect asthma care and outcomes. Our parent project, Asthma in Families Facing Out-of-pocket Requirements with Deductibles (AFFORD), found that patients with asthma may be particularly vulnerable to insurance-related cost barriers and challenges navigating health insurance. Together with the Asthma and Allergy Foundation of America (AAFA), the investigators developed an asthma chat bot to help patients with asthma navigate insurance benefits and optimize health care decisions. The chat bot is an artificial intelligence-enabled interactive online tool that can answer clinical and insurance-related questions and provide information on coverage and how to find lower-cost alternatives for asthma care. In this supplement to the AFFORD project, the investigators propose a new study to understand and address the insurance and health care cost challenges faced by patients with asthma who lose employer-sponsored coverage due to COVID-19. Our Aims are: 1) to conduct a pilot randomized controlled trial to evaluate the effectiveness and feasibility and acceptability of an insurance navigation intervention, including the chat bot, to help patients with asthma regain coverage after the loss of job-related insurance during the COVID-19 pandemic; and 2) to qualitatively explore the experiences of Aim 1 participants to understand barriers and facilitators to accessing coverage and asthma care more broadly during the COVID-19 pandemic The study hypothesis is that participants receiving the intervention will be more likely to have coverage after four months and less likely to report non-adherence to asthma medications, delayed/forgone asthma care, and financial burden than those receiving usual care. Findings will provide evidence about the effectiveness of strategies to obtain coverage and maintain access to affordable asthma care and can inform ongoing and future decision making in response to the COVID-19 pandemic and other public health and economic threats.

Vitamin D (VitD) deficiency is a significant public health concern in many areas around the globe which has been associated with many immune-mediated diseases, including asthma. Severe asthma has been linked with a decreased glucocorticoid receptors (GR) ratio (GR-α/ GR-β ratio), indicating steroid hyporesponsiveness. Using combined in silico and in vivo approaches, aimed to explore the immunomodulatory effect of VitD on asthmatic patients diagnosed with hypovitaminosis D.

Ex vivo effect of fragments and modified forms of surfactant protein D on pulmonary immune cells derived from bronchoalveolar lavage after segmental allergen challenge in patients with asthma and pilot study to assess local inflammation induced by segmental allergen challenge by magnetic resonance imaging.

The purpose of this study is to evaluate the feasibility of enrolling and randomizing patients into one of two educational interventions to teach appropriate respiratory inhaler technique and to collect preliminary estimates of the comparative effectiveness of two types of education. Teach-to-Goal (TTG) education employs instruction followed by patient "teach-back," then repeated cycles of learning and assessment until a skill, i.e. respiratory inhaler technique, is mastered. By contrast, Brief Intervention (BI) education only consists of providing the patient with verbal and written instruction on the skill, i.e., respiratory inhaler technique. The investigators hypothesize that hospital-based TTG compared to BI increases a patient's ability to learn respiratory inhaler technique. The investigators will test this hypothesis separately for the MDI and Diskus® devices.

The overall goal of this proposal is to examine the efficacy of a school-based asthma telemedicine intervention in a predominately minority, low-income rural pediatric population.

Approximately 5-10% of people with asthma do not respond to to standard therapy and are referred to as having difficult asthma. Evidence shows that this poor response is not always related to asthma severity and non-adherence to treatment is recognized as a common underlying problem, in 35% of these patients. Recognising non-adherence in the clinic is problematic as there is no straightforward objective test to identify it. Previous studies have demonstrated up-regulation of FKBP51 gene expression following treatment with steroids, making it a potential biomarker of steroid exposure. It is therefore also a potential biomarker of non-adherence to inhaled corticosteroid therapy. The investigators plan to assess the feasibility of distinguishing non-adherent subjects who are by omission steroid naïve from adherent subjects, steroid exposed subjects using FKBP51 gene expression in sputum and throat swabs. To do this the investigators will obtain throat swab and sputum samples from healthy volunteers, steroid naïve asthmatics and adherent asthmatics on high dose ICS to assess if FKBP51 gene expression is comparable in each group. The investigators will then compare the FKBP51 gene expression response to directly observed inhaled steroid therapy in steroid naïve, non-adherent and adherent asthmatics. This will identify if the response in gene expression distinguishes steroid exposed (adherent) from steroid naïve (non-adherent) patients. Identifying non-adherence will benefit patients by enabling appropriate tailored management for non-adherence to enhance treatment effectiveness. It will also identify patients with therapy resistant asthma who have an unmet need and may benefit from expensive novel therapies such as Omalizumab.

The overall goal of this project is to evaluate whether a multifaceted prompting intervention, administered in the urban primary care office setting, reduces morbidity among urban children with asthma. This study builds on our experience with a pilot study in two urban continuity clinics, in which we found that prompting clinicians about asthma severity and care guidelines at the time of an office visit resulted in improved preventive care delivery to inner-city children. This type of prompting program has the potential to substantially improve care for impoverished children with asthma, and we propose to establish: 1) whether these findings can be replicated in a similar study including a larger sample of urban children from different types of practices, and 2) whether the positive effects can be enhanced by more specific prompting directed towards both the provider and the caregiver and by providing practice-level supports and feedback. We hypothesize that children receiving a multifaceted prompting intervention (MPI) will experience less asthma-related morbidity (defined by symptom-free days at the 2-month follow-up) compared to children receiving usual care. Our secondary hypothesis is that children receiving the MPI will receive improved preventive asthma care (defined by guideline-based corrective actions taken at the index visit) compared to children receiving usual care.

Asthma usually responds to standard doses of inhaled steroids with or without additional therapies to control their symptoms. However, approximately 5-10% do not respond to this treatment strategy and are referred to as having difficult asthma. Evidence shows that this poor response is not always related to asthma severity with non-adherence to treatment being a common underlying problem, in 35% of subjects. Recognising non-adherence in the clinic is problematic as there is no straightforward objective test to identify it. Patients attending an asthma clinic whose symptoms are not controlled by standard treatment will be assessed for airway inflammation using fractional exhaled nitric oxide, and sputum analysis. These subjects will be observed taking their medication to determine if this reduces their level of airway inflammation. Prescription records will be used to ascertain if this test distinguishes those who are non-adherent with their treatment from those adults who have severe asthma. Identifying patients who are non-adherent to treatment will allow an appropriate change in management and enable alternative strategies to be developed to tackle non-adherence in this population. Distinguishing patients who are adherent to treatment but have therapy resistant disease would significantly improve treatment effectiveness in this group by allowing these patients to be suitably targeted with expensive novel therapies such as Omalizumab.