Active clinical trials for "Fibrosis"

As the name states, contact registries securely store contact information from groups of reasonably well-characterized patients (or primary supporters/caregivers) who are interested in being informed about ongoing or future research opportunities. Pulmonary fibrosis (PF) is a condition for which effective therapies have remained elusive, making drug trials and interventional research studies a mainstay in the PF arena over the last decade and for the foreseeable future. A PF Contact Registry will be a conduit to collect, analyze, and disseminate de-identified, group-level data on the clinical phenotypes of PF patients and will house contact information from patients who wish to be informed about research opportunities for which they may qualify. Data contained in the Registry will help inform research hypotheses and guide investigators as they develop research protocols by providing them with numbers of potential subjects who meet particular inclusion/exclusion criteria.

Cirrhotic patients are predisposed to intestinal dysmotility, bacterial overgrowth, and increased intestinal permeability all leading to an increase in bacterial translocation and increased endotoxemia. Rifaximin is an antibiotic that is virtually non-absorbed after oral administration and exhibits broad spectrum antimicrobial activity against both aerobic and anaerobic gram-positive and gram-negative microorganisms within the gastrointestinal tract. It has been suggested that oral prophylactic antibiotics or bowel decontamination might improve long-term outcomes in patients with cirrhosis. The aim of this study was to explore the suitable dose of rifaximin to alleviate endotoxemia and prevent the complications of advanced cirrhosis.

Anyone who practices clinical medicine will understand that socially disadvantaged children will have worse health outcomes, no matter what the underlying condition might be. There is limited prospective data on the effects of social deprivation on children in BC and there is none concerning the effects of social deprivation on children with chronic diseases. In order to generate relevant data for those who manage children with chronic diseases in BC, the investigators wish to perform an observational study of the relationship between questionnaire-derived social variables and measured outcomes in children with cystic fibrosis, type 1 diabetes, and chronic kidney disease. Our working hypothesis is that there is an association between social determinants of health (income, education, race) and health outcomes in children with cystic fibrosis, type 1 diabetes and chronic renal failure, that is independent of access to health care (assessed by distance to nearest specialty clinic and number of clinic visits in the last year).

The goal of this study is to identify chemical compounds in the blood and sputum (i.e., biomarkers) that are associated with objective measurements of health status in patients with cystic fibrosis (CF). This study builds upon observations that blood levels of hepcidin-25, a protein that regulates how the body uses and stores iron, vary during CF pulmonary exacerbation (CFPE).

The portal vein thrombosis (PVT) can complicate medical conditions like liver cirrhosis (LC), neoplasms, myeloproliferative diseases, thrombophilic genotypes, infections, inflammatory diseases, trauma and surgery. LC is an important predisposing disease and is responsible for about 20% of all cases. However, data regarding the PVT in cirrhosis are insufficient. Early studies have shown that, in absence of hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC), the PVT can occur in approximately 10% of cirrhotic patients. Most of studies are in support of a prevalence between 5 and 20% of patients with LC. A study in transplant recipients, has documented that in variable etiology cirrhosis, the PVT was present in 15.7% of patients, a higher percentage was found in patients with liver cancer (34.8%), while primary biliary cirrhosis (7.9%) and sclerosing cholangitis (3.6%) are less frequently complicated by PVT. The PVT development is due to stagnation in the portal circulation, but alterations in the sense of inherited or acquired pro-coagulant may favor its appearance. The causal association of PVT with bleeding and bowel infarction suggests that the PVT may reduce survival in cirrhosis, but data are lacking on this issue. It is also not known whether asymptomatic patients with PVT have a different survival compared to cirrhotic patients without PVT. Further studies should be conducted to clarify this issue. Likewise, prospective studies are needed to better identify risk factors predisposing to PVT in LC patients as well as to clarify the relationship between cirrhosis severity and PVT. The impact of PVT on the natural history of cirrhosis is an issue today still debated. The PVT not only favour life-threatening complications (gastrointestinal bleeding and mesenteric thrombosis) but could also contribute to a deterioration of liver function by reducing portal flow. Obtaining such information would be of crucial importance considering that the evidence of increased mortality related to PVT in liver cirrhosis may indicate the need for randomized controlled trials to clarify the potential effectiveness of anticoagulant therapy to improve the survival. To this purpose it's proposed to establish an Italian register of patients with cirrhosis. In the second phase of the project is planned a 2-years follow-up program in order to assess whether the PVT be an additional risk factor for mortality or deterioration of the natural history in patients with cirrhosis.

The aim of the investigators' study is to elucidate the relationship between a functional liver test (e.g., ICG) and the PREOPERATIVE value of portal hypertension in the patients with impaired liver function from alcoholic and non-alcoholic aetiologies. Alcoholic and viral cirrhosis present important differences in terms of cellular mechanisms responsible for the disease progression with a distinct and unique gene expression pattern that regulates the type of inflammatory response. These differences probably influence the hepatic functional reserve and the onset of portal hypertension at a comparable clinical and biological level of derangement and the investigators may expect significant differences in the recovery from hepatectomy. The investigators' hypothesis is that at a comparable ICGR-15 rate non-viral cirrhotic liver presents higher portal pressure values and the investigators also argue that alcoholic cirrhotic patients would tolerate a larger hepatic resection than would viral cirrhotic do.

Clinical and translational research in cystic fibrosis (CF) is hampered by a lack of biomarkers that can be used to identify promising new therapies. There is an urgent need for development and validation of biomarkers that more quickly predict the usefulness of potential drugs in CF and might prognosticate clinical course. In particular, combinations of protein biomarkers that can be obtained non-invasively offer great promise. The goal of this project is to determine whether protein biomarkers in blood can demonstrate a beneficial effect of treatment over two weeks. We intend to initially target an acute pulmonary exacerbation in CF because we know that subjects being treated with intravenous antibiotics and enhanced mucus clearance display clinical improvements within two weeks. We propose to prospectively collect blood samples from a large cohort of well-characterized CF persons serially during inpatient admissions for a pulmonary exacerbation and longitudinally during annual visits. Through this proposal, we hope to identify a CF lung injury biomarker panel that increases in the setting of an acute pulmonary exacerbation and improves rapidly following intravenous antibiotic therapy. Additionally, we will begin to explore whether this CF lung injury biomarker panel might also prognosticate clinical course including decline in pulmonary function. Finally, this study will serve as an important source of blood samples that will be banked for future biomarker and therapeutic studies designed to benefit the entire CF community.

Presently, effectiveness of treatments for CF lung disease is judged by improvement in lung function (FEV1). However, in CF patients, FEV1 can range from severely decreased to normal, and improvements may occur slowly. Thus, clinical trials require many patients over prolonged periods to evaluate medications. As the pace of drug development accelerates, it is no longer possible to test all of the promising candidate therapies using conventional study designs. A sensitive technique for assessing lung inflammation has been developed which uses the expression of genes located in circulating blood cells. Mononuclear cells pass repeatedly through the blood vessels of the lung, and are exposed to many of the inflammatory products that are present in the airways. Over the past 4 years the investigators have identified a small group of candidate genes that are unregulated or downregulated in response to antibiotic treatment. The investigators now propose to prospectively test this method of quantifying lung inflammation in a large group of CF patients undergoing treatment of pulmonary exacerbations. Blood will be sampled before and after antibiotic treatment for a pulmonary exacerbation, and the relative change in gene expression will be compared to improvement in FEV1 and other clinical responses, to determine the utility of this method for use in studies. If successful, this technique could allow for a rapid and noninvasive method to gauge immediate effects by new treatments, and assist caregivers in determining optimal treatment strategies for the individual.

The purpose of this study is to provide the necessary data and experience to design a larger, full scale clinical trial to determine if a certain medicine (repaglinide), which increases the amount of insulin secreted by the pancreas, can improve the nutritional status and pulmonary function of adolescents and young adults with cystic fibrosis and prediabetes by improving blood glucose control. The investigators are also trying to determine the relationship between systemic inflammatory factors and glucose impairment.

This study is performed to compare the efficacy and safety of EBL alone and EBL combined with propranolol in patients who were previously performed endoscopic variceal treatment.