Dr Amanda Tatler and Dr Rachel Clifford, along with many other researchers in Translational Medical Science at the University of Nottingham and NIHR Nottingham Biomedical Research Centre want to know what patients, carers and healthcare professionals think the priorities should be for scientific research for people with #COPD.
Understanding Patient Priorities for Scientific Research on COPD
This is an opportunity for people living with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and their carers to have their say on our research plans for the next 3-5 years. If you have COPD, or care for someone with COPD, we want to know what you think are the important questions for us to try to answer with our research.
Our research
COPD, which includes emphysema and chronic bronchitis, is a common lung disease affecting approximately 1.2 million people in the UK. It affects mainly middle-older aged people who either smoke or have previously smoked, although a small number of cases are evident in people who have never smoked. In COPD, the structure of the lungs and airways changes considerably; the airways become inflamed, damaged, stiffened and narrowed, making breathing extremely difficult.
The lungs are made from millions of building blocks called cells. There are lots of signals in our lungs that can change how our cells behave. In some cases, cells attempt to repair the lungs but the repair processes contribute to and worsen the disease. We are trying to learn how these signals and cell behaviour cause and/or contribute to the progression of COPD so that new medicines can be made in future. We are also trying to understand how our environment, particularly the air that we breathe, affects the development and progression of COPD.
Why we want your opinion
To do our research, we work with cells and lung samples that have been donated by patients with COPD. These samples are valuable gifts that have helped us to do our research for many years. We want to know what patients and their carers think about the research we should do in future, to make sure that we are using these samples in a way that is important to them.
How you can help
We would like to invite you to give your opinion on some questions that we could try to answer with our research. This is a short survey where you can tell us how important our research questions are to you. The survey should take 5-10 minutes to complete.
What we will do with the results
We will use your survey answers to help to decide which research questions to try to answer with our future research.