Online health discussion forums are used by different patient groups for sharing advice and information. Chronic cough is a common problem, and people with chronic cough use online health forums ...alongside formal medical therapies.
The objective of this study was to assess how chronic cough sufferers use online health forums, including the treatment advice they share with one another and the possible clinical uses of online forums in chronic cough.
Three open-access health forums were searched for threads related to chronic cough. Identified threads were screened against inclusion and exclusion criteria adapted from the British Thoracic Society (BTS) Guidelines related to chronic cough diagnosis. Included data were subjected to qualitative thematic analysis. All study data were cross-validated by a second author and discrepancies were resolved.
In total, 96 threads were included in the analysis, consisting of posts by 223 forum users. Three main themes were identified: the effect of chronic cough on the lives of patients, the treatment advice shared between users, and the provision of support within forums.
Chronic cough symptoms had impacts on multiple aspects of patients' health and well-being. To try and combat these issues, forum users suggested a variety of treatments to one another, ranging from mainstream traditional therapies to odd alternative remedies. The provision of support and empathy were also prominent themes in discussion threads. Online forums themselves may provide increasing benefit to users through the addition of a moderator.
Metabolomics refers to study of the metabolome, the entire set of metabolites produced by a biological system. The application of metabolomics to exhaled breath samples - breathomics - is a rapidly ...growing field with potential application to asthma diagnosis and management.
We aimed to review the adult asthma breathomic literature and present a comprehensive list of volatile organic compounds identified by asthma breathomic models.
We undertook a systematic search for literature on exhaled volatile organic compounds in adult asthma. We assessed the quality of studies and performed a qualitative synthesis.
We identified twenty studies; these were methodologically heterogenous with a variable risk of bias. Studies almost universally reported breathomics to be capable of differentiating - with moderate or greater accuracy - between samples from healthy controls and those with asthma; and to be capable of phenotyping disease. However, there was little concordance in the compounds upon which discriminatory models were based.
Results to-date are promising but validation in independent prospective cohorts is needed. This may be challenging given the high levels of inter-individual variation. However, large-scale, multi-centre studies are underway and validation efforts have been aided by the publication of technical standards likely to increase inter-study comparability. Successful validation of breathomic models for diagnosis and phenotyping would constitute an important step towards personalised medicine in asthma.
•The majority of published studies report breathomics capable of differentiating between samples from healthy controls, those with asthma, and those with other respiratory disease.•Of the seventy six volatile organic compounds cited as significant in the literature, nine were reported in more than one paper.•Validation ofthese findings in independent prospective cohorts is the next step in developing disease biomarkers.
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