By Laura Gallagher
Tuesday 2 February 2010

Research into serious lung diseases at Imperial College London has been rated the most highly cited in the world by the information provider Thomson Reuters.

The organisation looked at published academic research into Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD), a group of progressive inflammatory conditions that includes emphysema and chronic obstructive bronchitis.

In the UK, COPD affects around one in ten adults over the age of 40 and it kills more women than breast cancer. It causes the airways to become narrowed, leading to shortness of breath, and the condition is hard to treat so it usually becomes progressively worse. In the developed world, most people contract COPD through smoking.

Thomson Reuters analysed papers on COPD published over a ten-year period by nearly 10,000 institutions across 113 countries. The results, published on the ScienceWatch website, show that Imperial achieved more citations for COPD than any other institution. In addition, Professor Peter Barnes, the Head of Airway Disease at Imperial's National Heart and Lung Institute, achieved more citations for his work on COPD than any other researcher in the world.

In the video below, Professor Barnes explains more about COPD and how researchers at Imperial are tackling the disease. You can also listen to Professor Barnes exploring COPD in more detail in the February 2010 edition of the College's podcast.

528Medicine