Asthma Treatment Research

Asthma

What is asthma?

Asthma affects around 1 in 10 people, meaning that all families will have a friend or relative with the disease. Asthma varies in severity, and when triggered results in wheezing and coughing. In severe asthma, this difficulty in breathing can be life threatening. When an asthma attack occurs, the lungs become inflamed and the muscles which control breathing become constricted.

Asthma Causes & Triggers

The cause of asthma and asthma attacks is still not clear and it is believed to be due to a number of factors including genetics, infection and the environment. Likewise, asthma attacks can be triggered by a range of factors such as cold air, stress, exposure to pollen or simply exercise.

Please click here for further information about asthma.

Woolcock Asthma Treatment Research

The Woolcock works with the healthcare sector and asthma sufferers to understand how their disease can be treated more efficiently. Understanding how people use their medications and why a significant proportion struggle to do so correctly is an important aspect of our work.

We work with community and hospital pharmacists to develop new training materials for patients and work with the Pharmaceutical Industry to develop new inhalation medicines and approaches to treatment.

These strategies are as diverse as high-tech inhalers that remind you if you miss a dose, training GPs in communication skills and the use of the Internet for monitoring health. Our team is leading a major revision of international asthma guidelines, to improve asthma outcomes at a global level.

Care Planning & Treatment Of Asthma

Pharmacists provide easy access for the community and these healthcare professionals have adopted our training and intervention programs. This ‘pharmacist care’ has improved control over asthma and helped patients to manage their inhalers and disease. We also work with the disabled and elderly populations to understand specific needs of people with asthma who have cognitive or device handling issues.

We are developing diagnostic tools that allow us to evaluate the severity of asthma and use 3-dimensional imaging techniques to understand how the airways in asthmatics close and become obstructed. We are studying how the lungs in asthmatics change over time.

At a cellular level, we are investigating how extracellular matrix proteins are involved and are developing new drug delivery systems that target these changes.

Woolcock Institute – What We Know About Asthma

Our teams have been collecting cells from volunteers, over many years, and have been studying them to understand the molecular differences between people with and without asthma. With an understanding of the fundamental mechanisms we can create new molecules and drug delivery technologies which we can trial in the clinic.

It is also known that exposure to viruses, such as the common cold, can make asthma worse. We investigate why infections cause airways to become stiffer and less responsive to asthma drugs. We need to understand how this happens, and then we can counteract their effects on the lungs.

At a cellular level, our research has discovered one of the mechanisms by which asthma medications become less effective during viral infections and we have identified a pre-existing drug which may be beneficial.

Woolcock & Asthma Research Collaboration

The Australian Centre for Airways disease Monitoring (ACAM), formerly known as the Australian Centre for Asthma Monitoring, is a collaborating unit of the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare based at the Woolcock. The Centre gathers data from across Australia, through all state health departments, to track asthma at a national level. ACAM has been collecting prevalence, management and treatment data for over 10 years. These data are used to inform health policy decisions and develop new approaches to managing and treating asthma.

The Woolcock produced a report on trends in asthma control in the 21 years after the first publication of the Australian asthma management plan. Read Asthma Control in Australia 1990-2011

Get your asthma treated by the best at the Woolcock Clinic, a world-leading medical centre specialising in the diagnosis and treatment of all sleep and breathing disorders. Our dedicated clinicians are at the forefront of international sleep and respiratory research, ensuring our patients get access to the very latest approaches in care.

Our inter-disciplinary approach allows patients to be treated under one roof at our state-of-the-art facility in Glebe, Sydney.

Book an appointment

For bookings with a Respiratory and Sleep physician, please call us on 02 9805 3000 or complete the form below.  

Please ensure you have a referral from your doctor. To download a referral form, click here.    

Please note that the Woolcock Clinic is a fee-charging clinic and fees are charged at the doctor’s discretion.



   
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