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Help BEAT Respiratory Disease
About Respiratory Disease

About Help BEAT Respiratory Disease
Help BEAT Respiratory Disease is part of Research for the Future, an NHS-supported campaign that helps people living with respiratory disease find out about and take part in health and care research.
Taking part in research means you are not only helping to discover new ways to prevent, diagnose and manage illnesses but also learning more about living with and managing your own condition. Find out more
About Respiratory Disease
Respiratory disease is the name given to any condition affecting the airways and other structures of the lungs. Respiratory disease can also be called lung disease.
Examples of respiratory disease include chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), asthma and bronchiectasis. Find out more about respiratory disease and how to manage it on the British Lung Foundation website.
Around one in five people in the UK have developed asthma, COPD or another long term respiratory illness. Every week 10,000 people in the UK are newly diagnosed with lung disease.
If you’re interested in finding out how you can take part in respiratory research studies, join Help BEAT Respiratory Disease. By signing up you could help to improve future generations’ healthcare.
Joining Help BEAT Respiratory Disease
Joining Help BEAT Respiratory Disease is free. When you sign up, we will ask you for your contact details, what respiratory condition you have and whether you have any allergies. We will explain the different types of research and you can tell us which of these you are interested in.
It is always your decision whether you take part in any research we tell you about. Your participation is completely voluntary and you can withdraw from a study or from the Research for the Future database at any time without it affecting the care you receive.
Any information you provide is stored on a secure NHS database and will never be passed to anyone else. Please see our Privacy Notice for further details about how we protect your personal information.
Help us improve care and treatments.
Current studies

Let’s talk about cough
Bringing together people living with chronic cough, healthcare professionals and researchers to look at ways to improve support for people living with the condition.

Orchid
Study looking to understand why people with different chest conditions develop a cough and how their cough compares to people without a chest condition.

EVENS (Evidence for Equality National Survey)
This survey will investigate how the COVID-19 pandemic and lockdown is affecting people and will document the experiences of ethnic and religious minority people.
Find out more about: EVENS (Evidence for Equality National Survey)
How you've helped us

Developing a research proposal
Developing a research proposal to trial of a new smartphone app to help people better manage their own health conditions.

myAirCoach2 – self-management of Asthma
myAirCoach was a European-wide research project looking to develop a digital health system to help people monitor and manage their asthma.

How often do patients notice preventable problems in primary care? (Electronic Questionnaire)
Dr Jill Stocks, Research Fellow from the Greater Manchester Patient Safety Translational Research Centre, which is based at The University of Manchester’s Institute of Population Health, describes her experiences accessing the Research for the Future campaign. (Primary care includes all non-hospital healthcare such as GP surgeries, community services, walk-in clinics and pharmacies.) “Usually patient safety […]