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Tracking a Lethal Lung Illness
Tufts researchers at Baystate Medical Center win grant to study treatments for chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, the nation’s fourth leading cause of death
By Bruce Morgan
“We are excited to be able to build a toolkit that will be more powerful than anything done previously,” says Peter Lindenauer, an associate professor of medicine based at Baystate Medical Center.
Until now, doctors have suffered from a dearth of reliable data on the best treatment for chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, or COPD, which ranks as the nation’s fourth leading cause of death, says Peter Lindenauer, an associate professor of medicine based at Baystate Medical Center and director of the Center for Quality of Care Research there.
To answer that need, Baystate, a Tufts-affiliated teaching hospital in Springfield, Mass., has joined forces with Kaiser Permanente Northwest Region and the universities of North Carolina, Chicago, Illinois and Washington to build a data warehouse of COPD patients and apply systematic analysis to their conditions, treatment patterns and outcomes.
The six sites will share a $7.4 million grant from the National Institutes of Health over the next two years. Lindenauer is the study and site principal investigator. Mark Tidwell and John Landis, both assistant professors of medicine at Baystate, will assist him in carrying out the ambitious study.
“We are excited to be able to build a toolkit that will be more powerful than anything done previously,” says Lindenauer, who calls the NIH award an endorsement of Baystate’s recent efforts to strengthen research at Tufts Medical School’s western campus. Collectively, the six grant recipients hope to compile and track the medical histories of at least 20,000 patients with emphysema, chronic bronchitis or smoker’s lung that share the COPD umbrella, says Lindenauer.
Lindenauer likens the potential payoff of this effort to the medical knowledge gained from the far-reaching Framingham Heart Study, a decades-long project that identified factors that contribute to cardiovascular disease. COPD affects as many as 24 million Americans, he says, and the morbidity and mortality of the condition run high, with frequent hospitalizations, particularly among the elderly.
Bruce Morgan can be reached at bruce.morgan@tufts.edu.
