LRTI Study Kids
Research type
Research Study
Full title
Lower Respiratory Tract Infections In Children – Diagnosis, Host Inflammatory Response, Host Defence Peptides and Role of Microbiome
IRAS ID
252330
Contact name
Steve Cunningham
Contact email
Duration of Study in the UK
2 years, 0 months, 1 days
Research summary
Respiratory infection of the lungs place a significant burden on children’s health: globally responsible for 880,000 deaths/year. Current methods of diagnosing lower respiratory tract infections (LRTI include pneumonia and bronchiolitis) leads to inappropriate use of antibiotics, with no benefit in viral infections. Apart from vaccine prevention, antibiotics are the only current therapy.
Recent advances give an opportunity consider LRTI from a different perspective. Rapid tests (hours not days) identify not only the presence of viruses and bacteria in the airway secretions, but also the amount (higher = infection). Individual susceptibility to infection or more severe infection may lie in their ‘microbiome’, i.e. the natural bacterial make up of our airways, how we respond to infection (‘host inflammatory response’) and how well we are able to mount a defence against infection (‘host defence’). The infection, the body’s preparedness and capability to respond is often termed ‘LRTI syndrome’.
A team with the skills to assess LRTI across this spectrum is recently grouped in Edinburgh. To improve our understanding of LRTI syndrome in children we will collect lower and upper respiratory tract samples and to examine these factors. The methods need to be sufficiently sensitive to the stages of LRTI syndrome. We therefore will request to obtain samples from children with LRTI (including some who are clinically stable on an intensive care unit) and compare to samples taken from healthy children and children with chronic lower respiratory tract infection i.e. cystic fibrosis (whose microbiology is well and regularly studied) and healthy adults.
Our aim is to consider how well novel diagnostic microbiological methods might enable clinical trials to reduce over-prescribing of antibiotics in children with viral infection; whether host defences can be enhanced to treat viral infection; and whether bacterial markers of LRTI can improve the sensitivity of novel microbiological diagnostic methods.
REC name
South East Scotland REC 02
REC reference
18/SS/0158
Date of REC Opinion
23 Nov 2018
REC opinion
Favourable Opinion