Research Week 1 Part 3.docx

So even though they may have studied the topic from a lot of different angles, the angle that you have in mind may be very valuable, and may be very important, and may be necessary for you to take on. The studies that are generally replicated, that is to say the studies that are done over a second o...

So even though they may have studied the topic from a lot of different angles, the angle that you have in mind may be very valuable, and may be very important, and may be necessary for you to take on. The studies that are generally replicated, that is to say the studies that are done over a second or third or fourth time, are done over again because scientists find that the credibility of the findings have to be strengthened. They have to be shored up a little bit more. Here's why. If we have one study, and we have the findings of one group, that's helpful. When we start to get two or three or four additional research teams from other parts of the country or other parts of the world that are getting similar findings, now we can say, you know what, we're starting to feel very confident about our ability to use this data and to generalize it to other patient populations. If all we have is just one study and that's it, most individuals would vote to be very, very cautious if it's just one study. But again, when the studies begin to mount up, and they're basically replicated studies that corroborate the findings and provide alternative findings, then you start to get very, very confident that the science is really moving in a specific direction. The other reason for doing replication of studies is to provide additional support for emerging theories, and theories are nothing more than just working models or working propositions. They're a way of us being able to share preliminary information with other researchers so that other researchers can have a way of discussing things from a specific perspective. All right. So how do we get to the point where we can ask a good research question? Well, a good research question is one that can be answered using observable data. Observable data that is valid and reliable, both of those things together. Valid data is data that you're measuring, and when we measure something, and you're really measuring what you say you're measuring, we refer to that as being reliable. If, on the other hand, you're measuring the same variable consistent time after time after time, we say that there's a high degree of reliability. So when we gather data in a research study, we would like for it to be both valid, on a really measurable, we say we're measuring, and we would like for it to be reliable. We want to be able to also say that we're measuring it consistently. This also begs the question of the relationship between two or more variables, and this is something we're going to talk about more and more as time goes on. What an independent variable is and what a dependent variable is. An independent variable is a variable that can be manipulated or changed or altered or controlled by the researchers on the research project. A dependent variable is a variable that changes due to the changes in the independent variable. Let me give you an example of that. For example, you're doing a research project on a brand new bronchodilator. This bronchodilator has been used with specific types of animal models, but this is the first time that we're actually going to introduce it for use with human beings. So of course we're going to go through all the IRB types of procedures that we're going to need to go through to get everything to the point where they approve that. The bronchodilator is the independent variable. Why? Because we can either give you the experimental bronchodilator, or we can give you a placebo, or we can give you the usual bronchodilator that you always use. In any case, because that decision is being made by the researchers, that bronchodilator, the type of bronchodilator, is an independent variable. That independent variable causes changes in a lot of things, but in this case we're going to be looking at bronchodilation. And we can measure that bronchodilation in many different ways. We can measure it in the pulmonary function testing laboratory. We can measure it in many, many ways. That change that occurs as a result of the specific bronchodilator being administered is referred to as the dependent variable. Why? Because that variable depends on the independent variable, the bronchodilator, that is causing the bronchodilation to change in some way. So again, the independent variable is a variable that's manipulated or controlled by researchers, whereas the dependent variable is really the outcome. It's really what you measure. It's really what you see. It's really the change that occurs. In this case, we're talking about bronchodilation. No matter what's done, I want to always emphasize, be sure to do your homework and keep it ethical. This is Unit 1.3, Research. Where might it take you? This is a short personal journey that I'd like to share with you that simply illustrates how you just don't know how things are going to go in the world of research. And sometimes they can go in a positive direction, sometimes in a not so positive direction. But in many cases, the research pathway that you begin now often translates into the ability to do much more important research later on. And that's the beauty of starting down a pathway like this. Today we'll explain how basic lab research, in this case with mice, led to important applied clinical research with human beings. Sometimes basic lab research gets kind of a bad rap because sometimes people don't understand why scientists would do this kind of research. And later on what we find is that basic lab research helps us tremendously in our ability to apply clinical research that's of tremendous benefit to our fellow human beings. We'll also discuss the importance of sharing the findings from this type of research with other scientists and with other colleagues that might be doing similar research. And we'll also explore how building a foundation of research knowledge and skills like you're beginning to do now will lead to advances in the future and tremendous benefits on behalf of our patients. Well, this story really begins with the Space Shuttle. And here we can see the Space Shuttle launching in the upper left. And toward the center of the photograph, we have the payload bay, which is a huge area inside of the Space Shuttle. This is not where the astronauts ride, but it is a place where they can take cargo up into near Earth orbit. Well, in those days, they had something called the Getaway Special. It was a special module that was made available to college students who wanted to fly some kind of an experiment aboard the Space Shuttle. And so these are little self-contained payloads that NASA would place into the payload bay here. And then, of course, when the shuttle launched, the payload would be taken up into near Earth orbit, would stay there for a week or so, and then would be brought back down to Earth. Well, I was at the University of Central Florida in the Department of Cardiopulmonary Sciences, and there were several respiratory therapy students that were interested in going on and developing this so-called Getaway Special. But our professor told us that we would first need to study the effects of sudden rocket acceleration. And so we elected to look at how that rocket acceleration changes the physiology and the anatomy of the alveolar capillary membrane of these mice. So we subjected these mice to acceleration. The technical jargon is 6 Gs of plus G sub Z acceleration. And we wanted to see if by increasing the hemodynamic pressure inside the lungs of those mice, would we be able to produce some level of pulmonary edema? Would that somehow change the surfactant? Would it lead to alveolar collapse? Would it decrease the compliance of the lungs? But item number one was to find a place where we could actually launch our mice. And we also had to figure out what kind of launch mechanism we were going to use. So we developed a small launch site near the USF baseball stadium. Well, this picture shows a rocket that is available as a kit, and it happens to be a rocket that has a little transparent payload section, and you can put a mouse in here. And then this rocket then accelerates up to about a mile or so, comes back down by parachute. You recover the mouse, and then you can determine if there are changes in the lungs of that mouse as a result of acceleration. And of course, our hypothesis was that there would be, because we knew from our studies of these West zones that you probably have studied about as well, that blood tends to gravitate toward the bottom of the lung fields. And when that happens, we tend to get a lot of albumin in those lung fields, and that albumin can actually get into the alveolar hair spaces and cause some pathological changes. After the rockets were recovered, we would take the mice out, and then we would look at each of these groups of mice. And there were three groups. There was a no launch group, which was a control group. There was a launch group, which was an experimental group. And then there was a sham launch group that was also a control group. So one experimental group and two control groups. What we found was that in those animals that were launched, we had high levels of albumin, which, as we said before, suggests that there is some level of pathology. This is abnormal. In the no launch group, as you might guess, there was no abnormal albumin level whatsoever. The reason for this control group is because there were several students that felt that just by putting the mouse into the rocket, the mouse would have such a stress response that it might lead to lung pathology. We found that that was not in fact the case, because if you look at the sham control group and you compare it with the no launch control group, they're identical. The only one that was really pathological was the launch group. So we then were able to say that there was a significant amount of albumin that was detected in the fluid that we removed from the lungs of launched mice. There was normal albumin in the sham launched mice, and there was also normal albumin in the control mice. Alright, so let's look at the albumin values for each group of mice whose lungs we just saw moments ago.