Investigators
Principal Investigators
Dr Christopher O’Dea, Dr Elizabeth Smith, A/Prof Shannon Simpson, Dr Andrew Wilson
Associate Investigators
Dr James Gibbons, Mr Michael Beaven (PhD Student)
Research Members
Henry Brown, Tiffany Bradshaw, Denby Evans, Naomi Chapman
Project description
When babies are born early or ‘preterm’ their tiny bodies are put under a lot of stress that can result in health problems in later life. They are at particular risk of diseases that can damage their lungs. To help these survivors of premature birth, we need to first identify which children are at risk of becoming sick so that we can act early. In Western Australia, our research team has been following a group of young people born early for over 15 years. This group have had an in-depth respiratory health assessment at 5, 7, 11 and 19 years. At 11 years they had an exercise test where we noticed that 57% of the group had breathing difficulties during exercise.
Our research team invited this group for another exercise test as adolescents or young adults so that could identify if these breathing difficulties have improved as they have got older or worsened. Additionally, we investigated if these breathing difficulties affected how active they became as young adults, using an activity monitor that the participants wore on their hip. We recruited 90 participants including 60 preterm and 30 term born participants. Our initial results indicate that young adults born preterm have a reduced fitness when compared to their term born peers.
After being born early, most people do not receive any follow-up care in the hospital after the first few years of life. We would like to know what tests we should be performing in Western Australia to find out who may need ongoing help from a doctor with expert knowledge on the effects of being born early. Finding those children born early who are at risk of reduced exercise capacity and physical activity is the first step to finding treatments that can prevent these children from developing health problems in later life.
Specifically, we aim to:
- Determine how the heart, lungs, and muscles of adults born preterm respond to exercise and how this differs to peers born at term.
- Assess changes in fitness from childhood to adulthood in survivors of preterm birth, and the factors that may predict worse trajectories of fitness.
- Investigate how the change in fitness with age is associated with fitness and lung function in childhood
- Identify factors that may increase the risk for low fitness and reduced physical activity in people born preterm. Factors we are investigating include: the treatments given in hospital at birth, how much exercise these individuals do, poorer lung function, muscle development, or breathing issues during activity
- Promote clinician and community education to increase physical activity participation, and improve overall health outcomes for those born preterm
- Provide invaluable and long-lasting resources and recommendations for future generations of clinicians and researchers, in order to answer important questions regarding the long-term health of survivors of preterm birth
Funders of the project
WALHIP-CPET is a prospective clinical cohort research study funded by the 2020/21 Western Australia Child Health Research Fund (WACRF).