Active clinical trials for "Asthma"

Asthma is one of the most common chronic diseases in the U.S. Despite guidelines, adherence to recommended controller medications is low. Cost is an important barrier to adherence. Employers are increasingly adopting high-deductible health plans (HDHPs) which require deductibles of > $1,000 per individual/$2,000 per family each year. In HDHPs with Health Savings Accounts (HSAs), most medications and non-preventive care must be paid out-of-pocket (OOP) until the deductible is reached. The lower premiums of HSA-HDHPs are appealing, but the high level of OOP costs can lead patients to forgo needed care. HSA-HDHPs can exempt preventive care from the deductible, and employers can add Preventive Drug Lists (PDLs) which exempt certain chronic medications from the deductible (including asthma medications), making them free. PDLs have the potential to improve controller medication use, which could prevent negative health outcomes and reduce cost-related trade-offs for families. The goal of this research is to evaluate the impact of these two developments in the health insurance market -- HSA-HDHPs and PDLs -- on medication use and clinical outcomes for adults and children with asthma. To do this, tteh investigators will first conduct in-depth interviews with patients with asthma and parents of children with asthma who have HDHPs and traditional plans. Interviews will collect patient-reported data on how patients and their families navigate their insurance plan and make health care decisions when faced with OOP costs. Findings from the interviews will inform analyses of data from a large national health plan from 2004-2017. Investigators will select adults and children with asthma whose employer switched them from traditional plans or HSA-HDHPs without PDLs to HSA-HDHPs with or without a PDL. Analyses will examine changes in asthma medication use, emergency department (ED) visits, hospitalizations, and OOP costs before and after changing plans compared to similar patients who did not switch to a HSA-HDHP. The study aims to: 1) understand health care decision making and experiences of families with asthma with HDHPs; 2) examine the impact of HSA-HDHPs with and without PDLs on use of asthma medications and asthma-related ED visits and hospitalizations; 3) examine the extent to which the response to HSA-HDHPs and PDLs is affected by the presence of other family members with asthma or other chronic conditions; 4) examine the impact of HSA-HDHPs with and without PDLs on OOP costs for families.

The aim of this post-marketing investigation is to collect and assess the information about safety and effectiveness of ARNUITY® ELLIPTA® (hereinafter referred to as "Arnuity") in daily clinical practice. The investigation will include subjects with a diagnosis of asthma bronchial who are naïve to ARNUITY. The investigator will monitor the information about safety and effectiveness of ARNUITY for one year from the start date of ARNUITY administration and Pneumonia will be considered as the priority investigation matter. 300 subjects, from approximately 150 medical institutions, will be included in this analysis. ARNUITY ELLIPTA is the registered trademark of GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) group of companies.

Obesity is a major health concern in the Deep South resulting in a growing number of metabolic disorders that strain the resources of our healthcare system. Obesity is recognized as a major risk factor for asthma. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has stated "obesity is associated significantly with the development of asthma, worsening asthma symptoms, and poor asthma control. This leads to increased medication use and hospitalizations." Variations in the airway microbiome are correlated with the risk for development of asthma, and populations of different bacteria vary by phenotype amongst severe asthmatics . Proteobacteria are found in greater proportion in asthmatic subjects relative to healthy controls (37% vs 15%) while non-asthmatic subjects have a relative abundance of Firmicutes (47% vs 63%) and Actinobacteria (10% vs 14%) compared to those with asthma . Amongst those with asthma, obese asthmatic subjects have a relative abundance of Bacteroides (54%) and Firmicutes (26%). Notably, both phyla are part of the gastrointestinal microbiome, suggesting inoculation through gastroesophageal reflux which may be more common in obese individuals. Asthmatics identified as having improvement in their asthma control following treatment with inhaled corticosteroids appear to have a greater relative abundance of Actinobacteria (79.8%) in their airways relative to other asthmatics. Actinobacteria have been associated with the production of anti-inflammatory proteins and are speculated to be involved in increasing steroid responsiveness. Other studies have demonstrated that oral administration of probiotics, including Bifidobacterium species within the phyla Actinobacteria, lead to reduced Th2 cytokine production and eosinophilic inflammation, along with promotion of Regulatory T-cell (Treg) populations within the airway. We hypothesize that administration of over the counter oral probiotics containing Actinobacteria (Bifidobacterium) to obese asthmatic subjects will result in decreased airway inflammation and better asthma control by immune modulation.

The study will consist of three phases: Phase A: General population survey for estimation of the prevalence of asthma, and prospective collection of resource utilization and quality-of-life data for 12 months, Phase B: comparison of healthcare resource usage collected prospectively to the data collected using administrative data in the population recruited in Phase A, and Phase C: Economic modeling of asthma to extrapolate the findings across Canada and into the future years.

This study seeks a better understanding of the pathogenesis of asthma in early life. The aim of this project is to determine whether the offspring of obese mothers at 3 years of life have increased the risk of asthma compared to children whose mothers were not obese and whether this increased risk is associated with a programming altered immune reactivity at birth.

The purpose of this study to determine the proportion and clinical characteristics of COPD patients with asthma symptoms (ACOS) and describe current practices in diagnosis and management in Viet Nam and Taiwan.

The aim of the study is to assess the peripheral endothelial function in adult asthmatic patients and the relationship between the peripheral endothelial function and the pulmonary function.

The investigators propose to implement and evaluate an integrated care program for enhancing the care of patients with asthma in a region of Quebec province, Canada. The investigators will implement our intervention in a family medicine group practice setting and plan to deliver it to 150 experimental group subjects. The investigators will simultaneously study 300 control subjects who are receiving usual care in other regions of the province of Quebec. Our hypothesis is that the program will improve the quality of life of patients with asthma exposed to the program, asthma control, inhaled corticosteroid adherence, knowledge of asthma, and a number of variables that relate to the conceptual model selected as a framework for this study (the PRECEDE-PROCEED model of Green and Kreuter).

The primary aim of this study was to compare the absolute and relative effectiveness of asthma management in paediatric patients in the UK on inhaled corticosteroid (ICS) maintenance therapy as extra-fine HFA-BDP (Qvar®) pressurised metered dose inhaler (pMDI) compared with fluticasone propionate (FP) pMDI.

The aim of this study is to investigate the mechanisms of interplay between allergy (IgE and Th2 mediated inflammation) and virus infection in the development of asthma, as well as the risk and severity of acute exacerbations of asthma. Understanding these mechanisms should identify new approaches for novel therapies for the prevention of asthma development and for prevention/treatment of asthma exacerbations. Such treatment has potential to have a major impact on patient quality of life and to result in enormous reductions in health care costs. A human model will be used to identify dysregulated genes/proteins and determine relationships with disease outcomes. This study will compare lower airway responses between asthmatic and healthy control subjects undergoing rhinovirus (RV) experimental infection (subjects will be infected with rhinovirus as part of the study). This will have the dual advantage of investigating mechanisms in the most natural model possible, as well as developing a better model for testing novel therapeutic approaches. The investigators will analyse the samples from both subject groups, to determine their relevance to the human disease. Any genes/proteins shown to be dysregulated and related to disease outcomes in the human model will be very strong candidates for immediate translation into human intervention studies. Up to 12 asthmatic and/or healthy subjects will be recruited for a preliminary pilot study. These subjects will be ineligible to enter the main study due to the presence of neutralizing antibody to RV16 (~50% of subjects otherwise suitable for the study). These subjects will meet all other inclusion/exclusion criteria for the main study. The 12 participants will undergo tests including a single bronchoscopy, nasal sampling and blood tests allowing for optimisation of all sample processing techniques. They will not be infected with RV-16. In the main study the investigators will aim to study up to 15 healthy volunteers and 15 volunteers with moderate asthma (all on inhaled steroid treatment). Subjects will undergo a single baseline bronchoscopy 2 weeks prior to inoculation with the RV16 virus. Following infection with the virus participants will be required to attend for regular sample collection including 2 further bronchoscopies post-infection. Patients will be followed until convalescence 6 weeks post infection.