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Approved research

The impact of physical activity on COPD, asthma and lung function

Principal Investigator: Dr Melissa Russell
Approved Research ID: 28502
Approval date: September 4th 2017

Lay summary

Physical activity is an important factor for maintaining good health; however results of previous research have produced inconsistent results regarding the relationship between physical activity and respiratory health outcomes. Therefore, the proposed study intends to investigate the relationships between self-reported, and objectively-measured physical activity on several respiratory health outcomes, including lung function, asthma and COPD using data from the large UK Biobank cohort. We also wish to investigate the modifying or mitigating effect of physical activity on other causes (obesity, gender, smoking, history of disease) of low lung function and chronic respiratory diseases. Our goal is to improve understanding of the effect of physical activity on a variety of respiratory health outcomes, including lung function decline, incident cases of asthma and COPD and asthma-related hospitalisation. We hope that this research will assist in the optimisation of physical activity as both a preventative and therapeutic tool for maintaining good respiratory health in adults. Therefore, our proposed research will meet the UK Biobank?s objectives to improve the prevention of illness and promote health. This research will use an array of appropriate statistical techniques to analyse the relationships between physical activity measures and spirometry and questionnaire data collected by the UK Biobank. The work will be an exploration of potential associations and interactions between both the subjective and objectively-measured physical activity, and various respiratory health outcomes. In addition, we intend to use the spirometry data for group based trajectory modelling to develop patterns of lung function change. We request access to data from all participants with complete accelerometry data, spirometry data and assessment questionnaires. We further request access to respiratory-related hospital records, and follow up data.