Active clinical trials for "Asthma"

Asthma is the number one cause of pediatric emergency department (ED) visits in young minority children and is responsible for high healthcare costs. The ED is often the point of contact for many inner city children and many families view the ED as the child's primary source of asthma care. This study plans to test a new model of asthma care, Asthma Express (AEx), that includes a follow-up asthma visit in the ED for an asthma "check-up" , asthma education, a prescription for preventive asthma medications, an appointment for the child to see their pediatric provider and a home visit to assist families with environmental control methods to prevent asthma symptoms.

This is a study to establish the equivalence of OT329 Solis and Advair Diskus when administered by inhalation in patients with asthma.

It is an interventional prospective study. The study will assess the intervention of the "Therapeutic Education to the Patient (TEP)" on the quality of life in asthmatic children. The patients will be enrolled from the 1st of May 2016 to the 31st of December 2016 in the outpatient clinic of Pediatric Allergology & Pulmonology (PAP) of Respiratory Disease Research Center (RDRC) within the Institute of Biomedicine and Molecular Immunology (IBIM) of the National Research Council (CNR) of Palermo (RDRC-IBIM CNR), Italy.

Stable Asthma patients (GINA 1-2) stay 6 days in a row for 4 hours per day in a hypoxic chamber simulating 2800m above sea level. Study participants will be blinded to the treatment given and divided into a hypoxic and a sham group (about 360m above sea level). Effects of this intermittent hypoxia on the asthmatic inflammation of these patients will be measured. The primary endpoint is the change in forced exhaled nitric oxide (FeNO) before and after the study. Secondary endpoints include blood parameters, lung function testing and questionnaires.

The autonomic nervous system (ANS) plays an important role in asthma, primarily through the parasympathetic (by the cholinergic pathway) promoting bronchoconstriction. Asthma is a chronic inflammatory disease, however, bronchoconstriction is not always caused by bronchial inflammation, as occurs in paucigranulocitic phenotype or noninflammatory asthma. The hypothesis of this project is based on the activation of the parasympathetic nervous system (PNS) would be involved in the pathogenesis of noninflammatory asthma (paucigranulocitic phenotype) and emotional stress and poor control of patients with severe asthma. To determine the ANS involvement in the pathogenesis of paucigranulocItic phenotype in asthma and correlate emotional stress, mediated by the ANS, with uncontrolled severe asthma. 30 asthmatics with different clinical severity (mild, severe controlled and uncontrolled severe) will be recruited , along with a control group of 10 healthy people. Descriptive variables, spirometry, inflammatory parameters (FeNO and inflammatory cell count in induced sputum), blood, saliva, urine and hair to obtain stress markers (glucose, copeptin, prolactin, cortisol) will be collected, and be supplied validated questionnaires of asthma control, quality of life and stress. For monitoring the response of the ANS will be done through an electrocardiogram, recording the heart rate variability (HRV). This analysis is carried out with the collaboration of engineers specialized in the characterization of cardiovascular signals for measuring the ANS.

Bedside clinical case learning, such for respiratory distress, represent a challenge for medical teachers, especially in critical conditions. In fact, this kind of learning implicate the presence of an appropriate case (the patient itself), framework and may be time consuming which could compromise the patient's safety and wellbeing. New pedagogic tools have emerged to strengthen the medical reasoning and the acquisition of knowledge. in recent years, the development of medical simulation has found a growing interest in the medical teaching field. Contextualization, reproducibility and reliability are the characteristics of high-fidelity simulation (HFS) which guarantee a lifetime experience of clinical conditions without putting at risk patient's safety and comfort. The aim of this study is to assess the impact of HFS on fifth year medical students learning skills in the assessement and management of an acute asthma attack in the emergency room, and to compares it to other modern teaching tools such as "video-case"

Background: Asthma is a chronic inflammatory disorder requiring intermittent or continuous anti-inflammatory therapy. Patients often turn to alternative treatments as complements or replacements to conventional treatments. Aim: To evaluate the effect of salt room chambers (halotherapy) on bronchial hyper- responsiveness (BHR), fractional exhaled nitric oxide (FeNO), and quality of life in children with asthma. Patients: Children aged 5-13 years with a clinical diagnosis of mild asthma not receiving anti-inflammatory therapy. Methods: Randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled study assessing the effect of salt room therapy on BHR, FeNO, spirometry and pediatric asthma quality of life questionnaire (PAQLQ). The treatment period lasted 7 weeks, 14 sessions with (treatment group) or without salt halogenerator.

The purpose of this study is to continue to characterize the safety profile of benralizumab administration and monitor the pharmacodynamic activity of the drug in those asthma patients who remain on treatment for at least 16 weeks and not more than 40 weeks in the predecessor study D3250C00021 (BORA, NCT02258542).

In patients with asthma, reactions to allergens in the environment (such as mold, pollen, weed, domestic pets, and dust allergens) play an important role in causing asthma symptoms. However, upper respiratory tract infections, typically those caused by the common cold virus, rhinovirus, can also cause asthma to get worse. In previous studies at the University of Virginia, it was found that mild asthmatics, who had high levels of the allergy antibody (called IgE) in their blood, developed more persistent cold and chest symptoms when they were given an infection with rhinovirus (the most frequent cause of the common cold). The cold symptoms produced by rhinovirus tend to peak during the first 4 -7 days of the cold. These symptoms, including nasal congestion, are similar to what you have experienced with previous colds. This study is being done to learn how a common cold caused by a viral infection affects people with asthma. The goal is to learn how to improve the care of asthma symptoms caused by the common cold virus (called rhinovirus). Most adults experience one or two colds caused by rhinovirus every year. In addition, 75-80% of asthma exacerbations caused by viral infections are caused by this virus, primarily in children. Adults are less likely to experience significant changes in their asthma symptoms when they get colds, because they have developed protective immune responses from previous colds which help diminish symptoms.

The Wisconsin Center for the Neuroscience and Psychophysiology of Meditation will be a highly focused center dedicated to novel and cutting edge research on the mechanisms by which meditation works. The core set of hypotheses for this Center focus on the mechanisms of two common meditation practices: Mindfulness Meditation (MM) and Loving-Kindness/Compassion Meditation (LKM-CO), both taught in Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR). The investigators will study both Long-Term Meditators (LTMs) as well as meditation-naïve participants (MNPs). The latter group will be randomly assigned to MBSR, a rigorously matched comparison intervention called the Health Enhancement Program (HEP; MacCoon et al., 2012), or to a Wait List (WL) control group. This will give us a comprehensive view of changes that are produced by meditation practices per se, changes generically associated with interventions designed to promote well-being, and changes that might be effects of repeating testing protocols across multiple occasions. In addition, the inclusion of both novice and experienced meditators provides a wide range of practice experience that will provide critical information on dose-related effects, information that is lacking in the research literature today. Each of the projects is focused on examining the brain mechanisms and peripheral biological correlates of meditation. Project 1 (Davidson) will examine the impact of the explicit use of mindfulness and loving-kindness/compassion strategies on emotion regulation, specifically neural, biobehavioral and hormonal indices of reactivity to and recovery from pictures of human suffering and flourishing. Project 2 (Rosenkranz) will investigate the brain to periphery pathways through which psychological factors contribute to the expression of asthma symptoms. In addition, it will examine the efficacy of meditation training in reducing the inflammatory response to an allergen in asthmatic individuals by reducing the reactivity of emotion-related neural circuitry. Project 3 (Tononi) will examine whether the previously reported increase in gamma oscillations during Non-REM (NREM) sleep in meditators is associated with changes in sleep mentation (Ferrarelli et al. 2013). In addition, project 3 will examine relations between meditation-induced changes in brain activity during sleep and brain activity and cognitive function during wakefulness.