Tag Archive for: IMPACT DC

girl with asthma inhaler

Children’s National becomes part of CAUSE Network

girl with asthma inhaler

Seven clinical sites in six different cities will join forces to perform mechanistic and translational studies examining the basic immunology of pediatric asthma among urban, under-resourced and largely minority children and adolescents.

The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) allocated $10 million in funding to establish the Childhood Asthma in the Urban Setting (CAUSE) network. The NIAID plans to increase this number by $70 million over seven years to support the network. Children’s National Hospital will be part of the new research network, which is a 7-year consortium comprising of seven clinical sites in six different cities that will join forces to perform mechanistic and translational studies examining the basic immunology of pediatric asthma among urban, under-resourced and largely minority children and adolescents.

Children’s National is the home of Improving Pediatric Asthma Care in the District of Columbia (IMPACT DC). The program focuses on research, care and advocacy to decrease asthma morbidity experienced by at-risk youth in the region while serving as a model program for the nation. NIAID gave an initial $3 million to IMPACT DC to conduct its own pilot study of anti-IgE therapy to prevent asthma exacerbations. Additional support for this and other studies will come from subcontracts from the CAUSE Coordinating Center at the University of Wisconsin in Madison.

“This new award allows IMPACT DC to remain part of one of the nation’s most prestigious pediatric asthma research consortia,” said Stephen Teach, M.D, M.P.H., chair for the Department of Pediatrics at George Washington University School of Medicine and Health Sciences. “It will allow us to both pursue an independent research agenda while collaborating with similar academic centers nationwide.”

Pediatric asthma is the most common chronic disease in children, and it is estimated that about 6.1 million children under 18 years suffer from this condition. It disproportionately affects urban, minority and under-resourced children and adolescents.

“It is essential to develop an understanding of the basic immunology of the disease and therapeutic options to ameliorating these disparities,” said Dr. Teach.

CAUSE researchers will explore the mechanisms of immune tolerance to allergens, the role of early environmental exposures in the pathogenesis of asthma, the pathogenesis and mechanisms of non-atopic asthma, the role of the respiratory epithelium in asthma and more.

The CAUSE network comprises of seven clinical research centers, including Children’s National led by principal investigator, Dr. Teach, and the following research centers:

  • Boston Children’s Hospital. Principal investigators: Wanda Phipatanakul, M.D., and Talal Chatila, M.D.
  • Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center. Principal investigator: Gurjit Khurana Hershey, M.D., Ph.D.
  • Columbia University Health Sciences, New York. Principal investigator: Meyer Kattan, M.D.
  • Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York. Principal investigators: Paula Busse, M.D., Supinda Bunyavanich, M.D., and Juan Wisnivesky, M.D.
  • Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago. Principal investigators: Rajesh Kumar, M.D., and Jacqueline Pongracic, M.D.
  • University of Colorado Denver. Principal investigator: Andrew Liu, M.D.
doctor helping child with asthma

New guidelines advance treatment approach for children with asthma

doctor helping child with asthma

Patients with asthma will benefit from new recommendations from a team of national asthma experts.

Patients with asthma will benefit from new recommendations from a team of national asthma experts that includes Stephen Teach, M.D., M.P.H., director and principal investigator of the IMPACT DC Asthma Clinic at Children’s National Hospital. The new guidance, published in the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology, represents the first update to federal comprehensive asthma management and treatment guidelines in more than a decade.

The new recommendations are based on systematic reviews conducted by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, input from National Asthma Education Prevention Program participant organizations and a 19-member expert panel consisting of medical experts and the public.

“The updated guidelines touch on several management issues of critical importance to children, families, and clinicians struggling with the most common chronic disease of childhood,” says Dr. Teach. “Being a part of this expert panel allowed me to advocate for the unique needs of pediatric patients, especially those from under-resourced environments.”

The focused updates provide new guidance for six areas:

  • Using inhaled corticosteroids when needed for recurrent wheezing or persistent asthma.
  • Using long-acting antimuscarinic antagonists (LAMAs) with inhaled corticosteroids for long-term asthma management. A LAMA is a bronchodilator, a medicine that helps to keep airway muscles relaxed.
  • Using allergy shots that contain very small amounts of allergen to treat some people with allergic asthma.
  • Using one or more methods to reduce exposure to indoor asthma triggers.
  • Using a fractional exhaled nitric oxide test to help manage asthma or help confirm a diagnosis in some patients when the diagnosis is unclear. This test involves breathing into a tube connected to a machine that measures the amount of nitric oxide, which can increase when there is airway inflammation.
  • Using bronchial thermoplasty to treat selected adults with persistent asthma. During this procedure heat is used to reduce the muscle around the airways.

“The new and updated recommendations help to better control asthma in children and adolescents through the use of existing medicines, allergy shots and control of environmental triggers,” says Dr. Teach. “Taken together, application of these guidelines will significantly improve care and outcomes for kids of all ages.”

asthma inhailer

Picture imperfect: Eliminating asthma triggers through smartphones

asthma inhailer

Children’s National is among five awardees sharing $10 million in funding under Fannie Mae’s Sustainable Communities Innovation Challenge: Healthy Affordable Housing, a national competition to identify innovative ideas to help children and families enjoy safer homes. Fannie Mae made the funding announcement on May 21, 2019.

Children’s funding will underwrite a pilot program to use smartphones to enable virtual home visits, leveraging the skills of Children’s pediatric asthma specialists, health educators and community housing remediation specialists who will video conference with families in the home to identify potential housing asthma triggers.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 1 in 12 children and adolescents (6 million) have asthma, and one in six children with asthma visit the emergency department each year. In Washington, D.C., substandard housing can play an outsized role in triggering asthma exacerbations. Asthma-related hospital visits are 12 times higher in the city’s poorest neighborhoods, compared with affluent ZIP codes.

Working with community partners, Children’s faculty aim to eliminate asthma triggers right at the source, improving children’s well-being and creating healthier homes.

Right now during in-home visits, staff look for holes under kitchen sinks and gaps in the walls or flooring where pests and vermin might enter as well as leaks where mold and mildew can bloom. These systematic visits yield detailed notes to best direct resources to remediate those housing woes. The in-person visits however, are labor intensive and require delicate diplomacy to first open doors then to point out potential asthma triggers without coming off as judgmental.

“The beauty of our innovation is that residents can show us these same problematic locations using their smartphones, facilitating our efforts to target resources for that household. It’s a win for Children’s families because eliminating asthma triggers in the home means our kids will miss fewer school days, improving their lives and overall health,” says Ankoor Y. Shah, M.D., MBA, MPH, medical director for Children’s IMPACT DC Asthma Clinic.

Children’s collaborative project includes a number of partners, including:

Dr. Shah says the project will start in July 2019 with the pilot of virtual home visits starting in early 2020. This proof-of-concept model will hopefully be able to be replicated in other cities across the country.

Stephen Teach does an asthma exam

Stephen J. Teach, M.D., MPH, inaugural holder of new endowed chair

Stephen Teach does an asthma exam

Stephen J. Teach, M.D., M.P.H., has been named the inaugural Wendy Goldberg Professor in Translational Research in Child Health and Community Partnerships. This professorship comes with an endowed chair at Children’s National Health System.

The prestigious honor is given for the duration of Dr. Teach’s (and future chair holders’) employment at Children’s National. The award’s namesake, Wendy Goldberg, and her husband, Fred T. Goldberg Jr., are among the brightest stars in the constellation of Children’s National supporters, says Dr. Teach, Associate Dean for Pediatric Academic Affairs and Chair of the Department of Pediatrics at The George Washington University School of Medicine & Health Sciences.

In addition to serving on many Children’s boards, in the mid-2000s the Goldbergs made a $250,000 gift that benefited Improving Pediatric Asthma Care in the District of Columbia (IMPACT DC), Dr. Teach’s award-winning program to improve clinical care, empower patients and families, and conduct new research to improve patients’ outcomes.

“In recognition of the anchor aims of Children’s new strategic plan, the Goldbergs wanted this new gift to focus on the intersection of community health and research,” Dr. Teach says. “Thanks to their generosity, my team will work with community partners to use data to drive improvements in population health.”

With the dedicated funding Dr. Teach was able to hire a new staffer, Caitlin Munoz, to help mine electronic health records to create disease-specific registries that include 15,000 children and adolescents – the lion’s share of kids younger than 17 who live in Washington and have asthma.

“For the first time, we will be able to describe in granular detail the near-universe of local children who have this chronic respiratory disease,” he says. “We will be able to describe many of the most clinically meaningful aspects of nearly every child with asthma who lives in D.C., including mean age, gender, ethnicity and mean number visits to the emergency department.”

Such a richly textured database will help identify children who should be prescribed daily controller medications to help them avoid missing school days due to asthma exacerbations, he says. The next pediatric chronic disease they will track via registry will be pediatric obesity via elevated body mass index.

“That, in and of itself, is insightful data. But the enduring impact of this applied research is it will inform our continuous quality-improvement efforts,” he adds.

By querying the registries the team will be able to tell, for example, how Children’s primary care centers rank comparatively by asking such questions as which percentage of kids with asthma actually take the medicines they had been prescribed the year prior.

“Increasingly, clinical research falls into one of two buckets. You can either do better things: That’s discovering new drugs or processes, like our ongoing clinical trial to desensitize kids to asthma allergens. Or, you can do things better. We often know what to do already. We know that guideline-based asthma care works well. We don’t need to prove that again. We just need to do things better by getting this care to the kids who need it. That’s where this line of research/quality improvement comes in: It’s getting people to do things better.”

Stephen Teach

Stephen Teach, M.D., M.P.H., named associate dean at GW School of Medicine and Health Sciences

Stephen Teach

Stephen J. Teach, M.D., M.P.H., chair of the Department of Pediatrics at Children’s National Health System, was named associate dean for Pediatric Academic Affairs at The George Washington University (GW) School of Medicine and Health Sciences.

Dr. Teach is director and principal investigator of Improving Pediatric Asthma Care in the District of Columbia (IMPACT DC), a care, research and advocacy program focused on helping under-resourced and largely minority children who suffer from asthma. He also serves as principal investigator for the Washington site for the Inner City Asthma Consortium, funded by the National Institutes of Health.

At GW, Dr. Teach will play a critical role in supporting and enhancing education and training relationships between the university and Children’s National and will support the academic advancement of Children’s National faculty. Read more.