STEPDOWN Feasibility
Research type
Research Study
Full title
STEPDOWN Feasibility: Asking asthma patients about how asthma effects their lives
IRAS ID
310465
Contact name
Chloe Bloom
Contact email
Sponsor organisation
Imperial College London
Duration of Study in the UK
3 years, 0 months, 1 days
Research summary
Background
Asthma is managed with inhaled steroids. Long-term use of higher doses of inhaled steroids may cause health problems and costs the NHS unecessary money. Nearly all the good effects from inhaled steroids can be achieved from a low dose. Asthma guidelines recommend that medication should be used at the lowest dose possible to maintain good control. Over the last 20 years, more patients have been prescribed higher doses of inhaled steroids. Many patients could safely have their regular inhaled medication dose reduced, but this rarely happens.
Current there is a lack of scientific evidence on how to safely reduce asthma medication doses. Doctors and nurses do not reduce higher medication doses as they find guidelines unclear
Aim:
Undertake a feasibility study to find out if it is possible to do a future trial on changing the doses of inhaled steroids in asthma patients seen in GP practices.
Methods:
Patients with stable asthma will be identified using primary care records through a real-world research data organisation, Clinical Practice Research Datalink, funded by MHRA and NIHR. Only patients with stable asthma and using asthma inhalers of a certain strength will be approached to participate as these will be the study population for the future trial.
Participants will be asked to fill in 1 short survey (approximately 10 minutes) about how well their asthma is controlled and how it affects their lives. All participants will be sent questionnaires at baseline, 3 months and 12 months. Half of the participants will also be sent questionnaires at 6 months and 9 months.
The outcome will be
1) How many GP practices are willing to participate in the study
2) How many patients are willing to participate in the study
2) How many surveys are completed and at which time pointsSummary of study results:
The study was designed to see the feasibility of recruiting asthma patients using CPRD. I wanted to estimate how willing GP practices and patients were to participate in a 12-month study where the patients filled in short questionnaire about their asthma either 3 times in one year or every 3-months. The results were that 25% of GP practices of the 100 asked, did participate. Of the patients 15% that were asked did participate. Of the patients 60% participated that had to do the survey 3 times per year and 40% of those doing 3-monthly surveys. This information will be informative for future asthma trial planning.
REC name
East of England - Essex Research Ethics Committee
REC reference
22/EE/0068
Date of REC Opinion
25 Apr 2022
REC opinion
Further Information Favourable Opinion