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Childhood asthma begins as wheeze (a whistling sound produced by the airways during breathing) during preschool age.
Our team aims to optimise lung health early in life to ensure the best possible health outcomes later in life.
As both bronchiolitis and bronchiectasis are diseases of the airway surface, we will comprehensively study the airway surface and factors affecting the airway surface in infants hospitalised with bronchiolitis.
André Schultz MBChB, PhD, FRACP Head, BREATH Team Head, BREATH Team Prof André Schultz is the Head, BREATH Team at The Kids Research Institute
Culturally safe healthcare approaches are important to improve outcomes of Indigenous people. Non-Indigenous clinicians are often ill-prepared to provide such healthcare. The NHMRC Centre for Research Excellence (CRE) especially for First Nations Children has been studying for several years how to improve clinical care for Indigenous children with respiratory disease in hospital, clinic, urban, rural and remote settings.
The airway epithelium is the primary structural and functional airway barrier and orchestrates innate immunity. Some children may have underlying epithelial vulnerabilities that contribute to the pathogenesis of acute wheeze and asthma.
Children are disproportionately affected by the negative health effects of climate change. We did a systematic review to synthesise the available evidence on tested interventions to improve child health in response to the impacts of climate change.
We present lung virome data recovered through shotgun metagenomics in bronchoalveolar lavage fluid from an infant with cystic fibrosis, who tested positive for Stenotrophomonas maltophilia infection. Using a bioinformatic pipeline for virus characterization in shotgun metagenomic data, we identified five viral contigs representing Pseudomonas phages classified as Caudoviricetes.
Bronchiectasis is a worldwide chronic lung disorder where exacerbations are common. It affects people of all ages, but especially Indigenous populations in high-income nations. Despite being a major contributor to chronic lung disease, there are no licensed therapies for bronchiectasis and there remain relatively few randomised controlled trials (RCTs) conducted in children and adults.
Sputum induction is widely used in clinical settings for collection of biological samples from the lower airways. However, in recent years sputum induction has been associated with serious adverse events and even death. This position statement was commissioned by the Thoracic Society of Australia and New Zealand to address major adverse events of two deaths associated with sputum induction that have occurred in Australia in 2021, and outlines best practice for the safe use of sputum induction.