| Recruitment Summary |
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| Written by Stanojevic, Sanja | ||||||||||||||||
| Thursday, 13 January 2011 12:10 | ||||||||||||||||
RECRUITMENT SUMMARYIn total 80 centres were identified, of which 70 were contacted and 40 agreed to participate. PHASE I: OBTAINING INITIAL SUPPORT FOR THE GRANT PROPOSALFrom the outset, the collaboration included the three centres represented by the co-applicants of the Asthma UK grant (Leicester, Manchester, UCL Institute of Child Health). Recruitment of the international collaborative network began in August 2004 in conjunction with the preparation of the grant application; members of the European Respiratory Society (ERS) and American Thoracic Society (ATS) paediatric lung function task force were contacted to obtain written support for the initiative. The paediatric lung function task force is an international group of physiologists and clinicians, and has been instrumental in the development of standards for equipment and procedures in infant and preschool lung function testing since the 1980s. At the time of initial recruitment, all 40 known research centres were contacted, of which 22 (55%) responded positively and agreed to participate. An additional eight centres (20%) showed interest in the project, but did not have preschool data at the time.
PHASE II: PUBMED SEARCHAfter funding was obtained, a systematic PubMed search was conducted to identify researchers who were not members of the ATS/ERS task force, but who had published paediatric lung function results in healthy children. The search was limited to literature published after 1995, since there have been significant improvements in the methodologies and equipment used to measure lung function in preschool children in the past decade. Ninety-five publications with normative data for paediatric PFTs were identified, after exclusions for duplicate researchers a total of 53 research centres were identified. Twenty-six of the 53 research centres (49%) identified by the PubMed search were also members of the ATS/ERS paediatric lung function task force. PHASE III: ONGOING RECRUITMENTFurther attempts to identify potential collaborators were made throughout the data collection phase, including advertisements at international pulmonology conferences (such as ATS, ERS and the International Congress on Paediatric Pulmonology); through membership bulletins (such as the British Paediatric Respiratory Society, ATS and ERS) and by hand-searching relevant respiratory periodicals. Collaborators were also asked to advertise the initiative to their colleagues in the speciality. This strategy identified an additional 14 centres.
DATA COLLECTION SUMMARY
Once a centre had agreed to participate they were contacted to obtain all relevant information (protocols, publications, questionnaires) pertaining to the data they were contributing. Centre specific information including specifics about equipment, protocols and study population characteristics were collected systematically from each centre. This information was used to control and adjust for differences. After centre-specific information had been collected and verified by each centre, individual data points were collected. Data includes individual lung function parameters as well as demographic information for each child. Below is a summary of the data which was used to develop the reference ranges. This summary includes data which were used to develop the reference ranges and reflects cleaned data, excluding missing values, impossible values and data entry errors.
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| Last Updated on Tuesday, 25 January 2011 02:36 |
