Research

All the research programs conducted by the CCRE are intended to target important health outcomes: improved health status, reduced disease exacerbations, improved self-management capacity, reduced adverse effects of treatment, and improved cost-effectiveness. The overall objective for the Centre is for its research to have a key impact on clinical practice.
Its current and future research projects address the following specific diseases:

Asthma

Bronchiectasis

Pulmonary Embolism

Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease / Pulmonary Rehabilitation

Sleep

Tuberculosis

Evidence-Based Medicine Projects

Asthma, COPD and bronchiectasis
A unifying theme of our work in this field is enhanced objective and subjective evaluation of patients to enable better selection of appropriate therapy, assessment of response and modification of existing therapy. Research will examine the potential for adapting a number of strategies that have been proven to be effective for one disease and it will be applied to another.

Tuberculosis
The CCRE will extend existing research on the genetic and other risk factors for progression to active tuberculosis and the extent of transmission of tuberculosis among specific risk groups in the population. This research feeds directly into State and National guidelines for the control of tuberculosis practices and also adds to world-wide efforts to control this complex disease.

Pulmonary Embolism
Pulmonary embolism (PE) diagnosis remains a major challenge in routine respiratory medical practice because it is common and there are still significant problems associated with radiological and nuclear imaging, which are the central diagnostic modalities. The CCRE will conduct a series of clinical studies using novel and innovative investigation protocols with the aim of improved diagnostic outcomes.

Diagnosis and Management of Sleep Disorders
The CCRE will develop new outcomes-focused aspects of existing NHMRC-funded investigations. The CCRE projects will include developing and validating primary care based applications from generated research data.

Improving Health in Shiftworkers
Sleep loss in workers is increasingly recognised cause of human error in the workplace, particularly in transportation and certain service industries as well as contributing to poor health outcomes in shiftworkers. Projects focused at examining the effect of sleep loss on health to provide evidenced based data on work hours and health will be conducted.