Understanding asthma phenotypes

What is it about?

It is now well established that there are several different types of asthma, known as asthma phenotypes. For example, some asthma is linked to allergies while other people with asthma do not have allergies. It is important to find out more about the different asthma phenotypes to i) better understand the causes of asthma; ii) find new, more effective treatments and iii) prevent asthma. The World Asthma Phenotypes (WASP) study started in 2016 and is being conducted in five centres in the United Kingdom, New Zealand, Brazil, Ecuador and Uganda. This study is important because it includes centres where asthma is common and other centres where asthma is much less common and may be more likely to be the non-allergic types of asthma. Most research on asthma phenotypes has been done in high income countries; by including low- and middle-income countries we hope to find more clues about the different causes of asthma. This study will collect more detailed information than has been used for previous studies of asthma phenotypes, on types of cells and other markers in sputum from the lungs and samples from the nose, as well as blood samples and the usual measures of lung function and questionnaire data. We will use new bioinformatics methods to integrate all the different types of data we collect, to identify different phenotypes.

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