Development Award: Investigating the cardiovascular health in people with CF (ITCH-CF)

Dr Freddy Frost from University of Liverpool is leading a research programme to understand more about cardiovascular disease in people with CF as they get older.

Why study cardiovascular disease in people with CF?

Cardiovascular disease (CVD), commonly known as heart disease, is a group of conditions relating to the heart and to blood vessels. It includes blocked or reduced blood flow to the heart (coronary heart disease), blocked blood supply to the brain (stroke or transient ischaemic attack – usually shortened to TIA) and also conditions where the heart doesn’t pump as well as it should do. The causes of CVD aren’t clear, but it is thought that high blood pressure, diabetes, high cholesterol and being overweight are some factors that may increase someone’s risk of developing CVD. The risk of developing CVD increases as people get older.

Some studies have shown that people with CF may be at higher risk of developing CVD than people of the same age in the general population. More research is needed to understand cardiovascular health in people with CF and prevent CVD from developing. This is particularly important research now, as people with CF are living longer.

Working out who is at risk of developing CVD

There are a number of tests that are used to understand whether someone is at a high risk of developing CVD. However, because of the way CF affects the body, researchers don’t know if these tests are the best way of measuring risk in people with CF. This needs to be worked out, and new ways to measure risk of CVD in people with may be needed.

In this Development Award, Early Career Researcher, Dr Freddy Frost at University of Liverpool is doing two different studies to find out more about CVD health in people with CF. 

Using existing data to find out more about the health of people with CF

UK CF Registry is a valued source of information about the health of people with CF, however, it doesn’t collect detailed information about the cardiovascular health of people with CF. The researchers plan to work out ways to use existing databases of health records of people with CF outside of the Registry data, to find out more about their cardiovascular health. 

General health databases, such as GP records, are available for research purposes. However, sometimes these databases do not accurately record whether or not a person has CF. For example, this could be due to errors that are made in data entry into the database. Its important to find ways to check for mistakes, before the information is used in research. The aim of this part of Dr Frost’s research is to develop ‘rules’ for correctly determining whether or not someone has CF in general databases. 

These rules will be important for understanding more about CVD risk, and might also be used in the future to understand more about other little- understood complications of CF.