Abstract
The COhort of BRonchial obstruction and Asthma (COBRA) is a longitudinal cohort that involves 12 French academic institutions. DNA, serum samples and clinical data are collected at entry and every 6 months thereafter.
Of 1080 patients with asthma recruited between 2007 and 2015, 401 had mild/moderate and 613 had severe asthma. In cross-sectional analyses, compared with patients with milder disease, patients with severe asthma had more symptoms, exacerbations, hospitalisations and visits to the emergency department during the preceding 12 months, higher numbers of blood eosinophils, and more comorbidities. More than 60% of patients with severe asthma were therapy-uncontrolled at entry, and 152 of them were being treated with omalizumab. In addition, patients with asthma who had the highest eosinophilia levels (>300/mm3) had shorter asthma duration, lower lung function, and higher rates of severe exacerbations and unacceptable asthma control than patients with lower eosinophil counts.
Longitudinal analyses performed in 427 patients with asthma with at least three differential blood cell counts demonstrated that both eosinophil numbers and eosinophil increase over time were associated with the number of exacerbations occurring until the next visit and with Juniper score.
Studies with the COBRA cohort will help to improve knowledge concerning the risk and biological factors associated with asthma severity and to better understand their influence on the disease trajectory.
Abstract
The COBRA cohort will be a useful tool to characterise asthma phenotypes and to identify associated biomarkers http://ow.ly/10HX30d71vG
Footnotes
This article has supplementary material available from erj.ersjournals.com
Support statement: The COBRA cohort was financially supported by: Inserm, Legs Poix Chancellerie des Universités, Chiesi, AstraZeneca, GlaxoSmithKline, Novartis Pharma AG, MedImmune Pharmaceuticals and Roche. Funding information for this article has been deposited with the Crossref Funder Registry.
Conflict of interest: Disclosures can be found alongside this article at erj.ersjournals.com
- Received January 4, 2017.
- Accepted May 22, 2017.
- Copyright ©ERS 2017