Thank you for your previous agreement for participation in a respiratory research study when your child was a preschool aged patient and had a bronchoscopy (camera test of the lungs) at the Royal Brompton Hospital. You kindly agreed to their samples being included in our study called Patterns of Infection and Inflammation. This study included samples from over 130 children who were undergoing bronchoscopy for respiratory symptoms between 2010-2016. Your child’s participation in that study provided extremely valuable scientific information that is helping us to understand how infection and inflammation is related to wheeze and respiratory symptoms as a pre-schooler.
Where to next?
Having agreed to being contacted about future research opportunities, we are now writing to invite you to take part in the next phase of the study, now that your child is school-aged. Joining our follow-up study is entirely voluntary and will not affect the care your child receives in the NHS.
We are looking to find out how the children we met when they were pre-schoolers are doing now and to see if their symptoms at that time are related to developing asthma later in childhood. This next step will help us to understand what features in pre-school years lead to asthma and identify any possible treatments that could be used in the future to prevent asthma.
We would like to invite you and your child back for one follow-up research visit, during which we will ask questions to assess for a possible diagnosis of asthma, test your child for allergies, check for infection in their nose and throat and look at how their lungs are working using blowing tests (lung function).
We will be writing to all families who participated in the original pre-school research study to invite them to this research visit. As a token of gratitude, each participant receives a £10 amazon voucher for their study visit. This next phase would not have been possible without your child’s earlier participation either, so thank you once again!
Details about the study is available in the Parent Information Sheet.
We also have Information sheets for Ages 5 – 11, Ages 12 – 15 and 16 and over.
Please do get in touch if you and your child are interested in participating in the study: