Lay Summary
COPD is short for Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease. It’s a lung problem that makes it hard for people to breathe because their lungs are damaged. It affects over 3 million people in the UK. COPD patients may have times where their symptoms are worse. These are called flare ups. They may have increased cough, struggle to catch their breath or produce too much mucus (phlegm). These can lead to hospital visits, reduce quality of life, and could even cause early death.
“Inhaled steroids” are a type of medicine given in an inhaler. Some COPD patients take this medication to reduce their symptoms including swelling of the airways. This helps their breathing and can prevent flare-ups. But they can also cause side effects like pneumonia, a severe chest infection. It’s important to give inhaled steroids only to people who will benefit the most and have fewer side effects.
Aim: Our goal is to figure out what tests can tell doctors and nurses who will benefit the most from inhaled steroids.
Design: Many projects have tested if inhaled steroids are safe and helpful for COPD patients. But most aren’t big enough to show us who will benefit the most from this medicine. We’ll bring information from these projects together to combine the results. This will help us find tests that can identify patients who will benefit from inhaled steroids. We won’t collect any names or private information.
We’ll use a ground-breaking method to analyse the data called “Individual Patient Data (IPD) meta-analysis”. This method will help us understand the data better. This is vital as we’ll use this information to find the tests that can help target inhaled steroid use to the right patients.
Combining and studying all the data is hard work. The studies include more than 55,000 people with COPD. It needs dedication, time, and skills to get the right answer. We have gathered experts in COPD, clinical trials, statistics, and IPD meta-analyses to do it. The project will take 2 years.
Patient and Public Involvement (PPI): People with COPD are vital to our project. We have two patient representatives and our hospital’s PPI lead on our team. We will also involve more COPD patients in focus groups. Their opinions will be heard and used throughout the study. They will help us decide the best ways to test which patients would benefit from inhaled steroids. They will also help us decide, what tests are acceptable in normal doctor appointments, how to share our findings and plan future research.