AUTHOR=Aydin Malik , Naumova Ella A. , Lutz Soeren , Meyer-Bahlburg Almut , Arnold Wolfgang H. , Kreppel Florian , Ehrhardt Anja , Postberg Jan , Wirth Stefan 

TITLE=Do Current Asthma-Preventive Measures Appropriately Face the World Health Organization's Concerns: A Study Presentation of a New Clinical, Prospective, Multicentric Pediatric Asthma Exacerbation Cohort in Germany

JOURNAL=Frontiers in Pediatrics

VOLUME=Volume 8 - 2020

YEAR=2020

URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/pediatrics/articles/10.3389/fped.2020.574462

DOI=10.3389/fped.2020.574462

ISSN=2296-2360

ABSTRACT=In summer 2017, the World Health Organization (WHO) published 10 facts on asthma, which is known as a major non-communicable disease of high clinical and scientific importance with currently 300 million people – with many children among them – suffering from air passages inflammation and narrowing. Importantly, the WHO sees asthma being under-diagnosed and under-treated. Consequently, much more efforts in the clinical disease management and research need to be spent in order to reduce the asthma-related health burden. Particularly, for young approximately 6 months aged patients presenting recurrent bronchitic respiratory symptoms, many parents anxiously ask the doctors for risk prognosis for their children’s future life. Therefore, we urgently need to re-evaluate if the current diagnostic and treatment measures are in concordance with our yet incomplete knowledge of pathomechanisms on exacerbation. In order to contribute to this increasing concern worldwide, we have established a multicentric pediatric exacerbation study network in Germany, still recruiting acute exacerbated asthmatics (children > 6 years) and preschool asthmatics/wheezers (children < 6 years) since winter 2018 in Germany. The current study population comprising 176 study participants with the aim of discovering novel holistic entry points for achieving a better understanding into the poorly understood plasticity of involved molecular pathways and to define biomarkers enabling improved diagnostics and therapeutics. With this study description, we want to present the study design, population, and the ongoing experiments for novel biomarker research.