Researching asthma across the ages: Insights from the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute’s Asthma Network

Abstract

Clinical asthma studies across different age groups, or ‘cross-age’ studies, can potentially offer insight into the similarities, differences and relationships between childhood and adult asthma. The National Institutes of Health Asthma Research Network (AsthmaNet) is unique and innovative in that it has merged pediatric and adult asthma research into one clinical research network. This combination enhances scientific exchange between pediatric and adult asthma investigators and encourages the application of ‘cross-age’ studies that involve participants from multiple age groups who are generally not studied together. The experience from AsthmaNet in the development of ‘cross-age’ protocols highlights some of the issues in the evaluation of cross-age research in asthma. The aim of this review is to summarize these challenges, including the selection of parallel, cross-age clinical interventions, identification of appropriate controls, measurement of meaningful clinical outcomes, as well as various ethical and logistical issues.

Year in Review 2014: Asthma

“…The National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute Asthma Network (AsthmaNet) devised a strategy to identify similarities and differences across age groups; to verify important interventions, data exchanges, and clinical outcomes; and to overcome operational challenges between populations of patients. 3 Topics reviewed in the merged network include subject recruitment and specific consent challenges, demographics and populations, pediatric and adult asthma phenotypes, interventions related to control and outcomes, and growth and development. This combined network generated an enhanced repository of evidence-based information to be shared with clinicians participating at every level of care.…”

A brief glimpse over the horizon for type 1 diabetes nanotherapeutics

“…Allergies including allergic asthma and severe food allergies affect~20% of the population while the prevalence of autoimmune diseases in the general population is currently at 4.5% [11][12][13][14][15][16][17]. The standard-of-care as well as emerging therapies are centered on systemic delivery of immunosuppresive drugs that require chronic administration which can exacerbate opportunistic infections, reactivate latent pathogens and can predispose to malignancy [18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33].…”

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“…Asthma in people is defined as "a [multiphenotypic] chronic inflammatory disorder of the airways associated with airway hyper-responsiveness [leading] to recurrent episodes of wheezing, breathlessness, chest tightness, coughing, [and] airflow obstruction often reversible with or without treatment" [124][125][126]. Asthma affects more than 10% of the North American population with the age of onset, pathophysiology, and response to treatment extremely variable [127,128].…”