Jacobs School Shines at Thoracic Society Meeting

There, a team of researchers from the Department of Medicine shared findings on pulmonary rehabilitation and mortality rates, among other research, which could help advance therapies for several common lung diseases. 

Recently, Francois Fadell, MD, MBA, associate professor of clinical medicine and associate program director for the internal medicine residency program, formed a pulmonary and critical care medicine working group of two fellows and nine residents. It’s an unusually large team, he says, brought together by similar research and academic interests.

ATS is the largest annual meeting of pulmonary and critical care specialists, Fadell says. At this year’s conference, the research team shared 13 abstracts, all of which are also published in the American Journal of Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine.

The team participated in abstract discussion sessions, poster presentations, and an oral presentation, lending the Jacobs School a marked presence amid national and international expert pulmonologists and researchers.

At the conference, Yu-Che Lee, MD, MPH, a second-year pulmonary and critical care medicine fellow, received a prestigious ATS Abstract Scholarship early-career research award for his presented abstract “Impact of Social Determinants and Community Resilience on COPD Mortality in the U.S.”

“It’s very highly selective to receive a scholarship award and highly selective to present and have an oral presentation,” Fadell says.

Lee says that “attending the ATS conference was a really great experience. As a fellow, it was very exciting to present my work at a national conference, not just a local or regional one.”

In addition to clinical research and providing care for individual patients, Lee says he’s interested in public health and policy and looking at ways to improve population health.

He noted that attending conferences like the ATS can be especially valuable for students and trainees starting out. “You can meet a lot of researchers, physicians and experts and learn a lot from clinical sessions,” he says, adding that he received a lot of helpful feedback about his work.

Much of the Jacobs School research shared at the conference described the connection between pulmonary rehabilitation and reduced mortality rates. Pulmonary rehabilitation uses breathing exercises and similar approaches to restore lung function and capacity, like physical therapy for the lungs, says Ryan Ruia, MD, a first-year internal medicine resident who presented at the conference.

Pulmonary rehabilitation has been shown to increase survival rates among COPD patients. But the researchers wanted to explore its potential benefit for other lung diseases.

“Pulmonary rehabilitation as a tool to treat non-COPD pulmonary patients is not a very well-studied treatment,” Fadell says. “In the research that we’ve done, we’ve showed that it could potentially improve survival rates. It’s linked to and correlates with improved survival.”

The team analyzed data from the TriNetX database, which Lee describes as a global health research network that provides access to de-identified electronic medical records from more than 250 participating health care organizations, including many large academic medical centers and health systems across the United States.

The researchers looked at data from patients with bronchiectasis, sleep apnea, post-COVID-19 complications, and interstitial lung disease. The findings revealed that patients with these conditions who received pulmonary rehabilitation had decreased mortality rates. 

Ruia, who presented research on sleep apnea and pulmonary rehabilitation at the conference, also shared work on pulmonary rehabilitation and asthma. While the researchers’ findings did not reveal decreased mortality among asthma patients, rehabilitation did show reduced asthma exacerbations, Ruia says, such as wheezing, shortness of breath, hospitalizations, emergency room visits, or use of rescue inhalers.

Asthma is typically not fatal, but reduced exacerbations can mean better patient well-being and decreased hospitalizations and health care costs, Ruia says.

He adds that the team’s findings and additional research on pulmonary rehabilitation could help encourage health care providers to expand rehabilitation practices.

“Pulmonary rehabilitation, medically speaking, is a relatively new thing,” Ruia says. “And the more data that comes out that shows that these treatments are actually beneficial, the more we can present to hospitals and others and say, ‘Hey, we need to establish these programs, look at what they do.’”