ELMWOOD ASTHMA ACTION'S DONATIONS TO QUEENS UNIVERSITY BELFAST
Elmwood Asthma Action – supporting Queen’s asthma research for over 11 years Queen’s and the local Elmwood Asthma Action fundraising group share an important common goal – to improve the quality of life for those suffering from asthma and in particular, difficult asthma which is hard to control.
Elmwood Asthma Action have been supporting the innovative research within the Wellcome-Wolfson Institute for Experimental Medicine at Queen’s for over 11 years. In Northern Ireland, 182,000 people (one in ten) are currently receiving treatment for asthma, including 36,000 children.
Difficult or severe asthma affects up to 20% of those patients. The current treatment for difficult asthma costs the NHS over £10,000 per patient, while studies have shown that difficult asthma can be the result of non-adherence (patients not using their inhalers or failing to use their inhalers effectively). With the support of Elmwood Asthma and others, in an effort to address non-adherence and poor inhaler technique, Professors Mike Shields and Professor James McElnay (Pharmacy) have been using remote monitoring technologies, via an iPhone or Android app, to monitor a sample of young patients and their use of their inhalers.
The trial was a great success and with ongoing support from medical staff, after six weeks every patient was taking their inhaler effectively. Professors Shields and Professor McElnay are now developing this remote directly observed therapy (R-DOT) into a platform that can be used more widely across the NHS.
This should allow doctors to both confirm that patients are taking their inhaler correctly and that they are adhering to the recommended frequency.
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ASTHMA RESEARCH AT QUEENS UNIVERSITY BELFAST
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Queen’s University Belfast is a leading centre for research into respiratory disease including difficult asthma, cystic fibrosis and acute lung injury. The asthma research programmes are based in our new Centre for Experimental Medicine beside Belfast City Hospital.
There are 5.4 million people with asthma in the UK which means asthma affects one in every 11 people and one in five households. In Northern Ireland, 182,000 people (1 in 10) are currently receiving treatment for asthma, including 36,000 children.
Queen’s University is a partner in the Asthma UK Centre for Applied Research, working together to find better treatments for asthma and to make them available faster than ever before.
Difficult to treat asthma affects up to 20% of patients with asthma in the UK despite currently available therapies and is associated with significant healthcare cost. Treatment guidelines advise the ‘step wise’ increase of corticosteroids but the response is often poor as this “one size fits all” approach does not benefit all patients.
Characterising a patient’s response to treatment will help our understanding of nonresponse and will aid development of new drugs for severe asthma.
Our primary focus is to target corticosteroid treatments more effectively and to understand why some patients do not respond to corticosteroids.
In some patients with difficult to treat asthma, the problem is non-adherence, whereby patients, intentionally or non-intentionally, do not take their prescribed corticosteroid treatment. We are going to assess adherence using remote monitoring technologies and non- adherent patients will be assisted, improving their quality of life.
Our industry partners are developing new treatments for severe asthma that will be tested in patients and asthma ‘biomarkers’ will be identified to predict response to these new therapies.
We want to ensure patients receive the lowest appropriate dose of corticosteroids, managing their disease and minimising harmful-side effects .
We know that patients with low measures of certain asthma biomarkers have a low chance of having an asthma attack and we can safely reduce and optimise their corticosteroid treatment dose.
We are also trying to determine which children with pre-school wheezing go on to develop true asthma so that potentially preventative therapy can be started early and in a targeted fashion.
Your support can provide much needed extra funding and help us to develop new treatments faster .
100% of your donation will go to asthma research at Queen’s.
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