Active clinical trials for "Pulmonary Disease, Chronic Obstructive"

There are 24,000 admissions each year to Intensive Care Units (ICU) in the United Kingdom due to pneumonia, asthma and a common condition called chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), with rates of death of 10%, 40% and 50%, respectively. These conditions account for 10% of all ICU admissions. It is therefore important to find out if it would be possible to detect deteriorations in patients with breathing problems early, in order to increase appropriately their level of care. Clinical early warning scores (EWS) are used in many hospitals to detect patients whose medical condition is getting worse, and who are likely to need admission to intensive care or high dependency care units. EWS are usually calculated from several measurements taken from the patient, such as blood pressure, temperature and heart rate. However, they are often inaccurate as they need to be calculated manually by nursing staff from a number of measurements taken from a variety of different devices. Furthermore, even when accurately calculated, it is not clear how helpful EWS are in predicting whether or not patients will deteriorate. Neural respiratory drive (NRD) is an objective indicator of breathlessness, and can be derived from the amount of electrical activity occurring in certain muscles used in breathing. The Myotrace system measures this electrical activity, as well as measurements such as rate of breathing and heart rate. It then analyses these measurements together to help identify patients at risk of deterioration. This study will use Myotrace to monitor patients with severe breathing difficulties due to an acute worsening of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, for early identification of failure to respond to medical treatment. Patients will be recruited at St. Thomas' Hospital. This research is funded by the Guy's and St. Thomas' Charity.

The aim of this study was to investigate the associations between serum concentrations of vitamin D, Magnesium and Calcium in Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease patients and the potential impact of these parameters on lung function and quality of life.

The study is a follow-up of investigations done in the years 1999-2002 in bakery employees. The main purposes are to look at the associations between flour dust exposure and respiratory disease, and to find out the best ways to reduce the flour dust levels in the working environment.

Lymphoid follicles, consisting of T-and B cells, are involved in the chronic inflammatory response in COPD. Foxp3 positive regulatory T cells (Tregs) are present in these follicles and may be involved in the suppression of this chronic inflammatory response. We hypothesise that a dysfunction of Tregs underlies the development of the inflammatory response in COPD. This could be either due to a decreased presence of Tregs in COPD, or to an altered function of Tregs possibly caused by a decreased HO-1 expression and/or an altered TGFβ regulation.

The University of Ottawa and Élisabeth Bruyère Research Institute are conducting a study of preventive care for frail patients at risk of functional decline. At risk patients are assigned by chance to continue receiving their standard care from their family physician or receive additional care from a nurse practitioners and a pharmacist. In collaboration with the family physician, they develop an individualized care plan, a treatment and management road plan, for each patient, which they implement over the study period of one approximately year. The objective of the study is to compare the effectiveness of the model of care that includes the nurse practitioners and pharmacist against standard care in preventing functional decline, to determine the acceptability of this model of care to patients, their caregivers and the medical team, and to evaluate the cost implication of the program.

To continue to evaluate risk factors heretofore determined to be important predictors of chronic respiratory symptoms, diagnosis of asthma, and alterations in expected levels of lung function in children and adolescents in a new population of young adult women.

The goal of this research agenda is to improve the quality of end-of-life care by explicitly identifying values that will guide the decision-making process, with a particular emphasis on the role of ethnic, racial and cultural factors.

To develop a scientifically valid and ethnically approved, lay-led smoking cessation intervention for Southeast Asian men and women, i-e., those from Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam.

To determine the effects in early adulthood of asthma, increased bronchial responsiveness, markers of allergy and smoking on pulmonary function level and the effects of these same risk factors on subsequent decline in pulmonary function, because these early adult factors presumably profoundly influence the risk for chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.

To test a conceptual model of how disability develops in chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD).