The Courier & Advertiser (Perth and Perthshire Edition)
Asthma study benefits felt around world
Groundbreaking research into asthma treatment, which began on children in Tayside and Fife, has become the biggest global study of its kind.
The doctor who led trials over the last 17 years said thousands of youngsters across the world will have their lives improved thanks to the research, which started in Pe r t h and Dundee almost two decades ago.
The findings, known as precision medicine, show children’s asthma symptoms could be better contro l led with personalised treatments. They have now been presented to the European Respiratory Society and are being developed to treat children in America.
Professor Somnath Mukhopadhyay began the trial with NHS Tayside, Dundee University and around 650 local children in 2003 when he became frustrated because standard treatments, such as the most commonly prescribed inhaler, did not help many of his young patients.
He said: “We had a relatively small rate of medicines which generally worked well but we found they do not work on a significant minority of children.
“Children were missing school, they were being admitted to hospital regularly, there was a lot of suffering.
“Steroids were the main treatment for children with asthma.
“We realised the children had different sub types of the disease, so if we could identify the individual forms we could treat them specifically and get much better results.”
In the UK, asthma affects one in 11 children and every 18 minutes a child is admitted to hospital because of the condition.
With 339 million people suffering worldwide, it is thought to be the most common chronic disease in the world.
During the first trial, Prof Mukhopadhyay moved to
Brighton and Sussex Medical School, which has since been working with Dundee University on the project.
He said: “We organised controlled trials to treat children by genotype.
“The first study done in Tayside picked up the children with the ‘wrong gene’ and changed their medicine. I didn’t expect any results within 10 years. I thought we would need to pore over everything and look at how to take it forward but we picked up some early leads.
“The first children it worked on saw almost immediate improvements to their quality of life, they were no longer struggling with stairs or sport.”
Around 30 papers have been published on the subject since and it has become the largest study of asthma in children in the world.
It is hoped researchers will now be able to look in even closer detail at how medication can be adapted for people with specific gene types.