COPD Breathing Record Study 2 (CBRS2)
Research type
Research Study
Full title
Characterisation of COPD breathing records during exacerbations
IRAS ID
228305
Contact name
Ravi Mahadeva
Contact email
Sponsor organisation
Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust
Duration of Study in the UK
1 years, 2 months, 31 days
Research summary
We would like to test the use of a new, hand-held device to understand the cause of someone’s changing breathlessness due to Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD). We would like to investigate whether the device can be used to help to people monitor their condition over time and let them know when things are getting worse, allowing people to feel more ‘in control’ of their breathing problems and potentially avoiding hospital admissions.
When we breathe out, we all exhale carbon dioxide (CO2). The CO2 levels in breath change as we breathe out and this makes a consistent pattern or “waveform”. A preliminary study which we completed in 2016 has shown that patients with COPD have different waveforms to people with healthy lungs. It also showed that the shape of the waveform changes with the state of the COPD. The new device, called ‘N-Tidal C’, is a hand-held, personal monitor that has been designed to accurately measure the CO2 waveform that we all breathe out. Using this test in people may enable us to recognise the changes that occur prior to a flare-up of the COPD in a way that other currently-used tests cannot.
The device is simple to use. A person just has to breathe in and out into a mouthpiece at their normal relaxed rate of breathing for 75 seconds. It does not need any extra effort, and so has great benefits over current breathing tests that require a lot of patient effort. The information about the level of CO2 is stored in an electronic chip and can be viewed by the investigators on a computer, and will show an individual’s exhaled CO2 waveform as a graph for each breath.
REC name
West Midlands - Solihull Research Ethics Committee
REC reference
17/WM/0228
Date of REC Opinion
21 Jun 2017
REC opinion
Favourable Opinion