Join a study to explore ‘clusters’ of gut symptoms in CF to see if they have common causes.

This is an ambitious project and we have brought together a lot of expertise. Here are some of the people who are helping us.

Prof Alan Smyth. Alan is a paediatrician and researcher, based at the University of Nottingham. He has spent the last 10 years studying gut symptoms in CF and has recently been using MRI scans to do this.

Prof Daniel Peckham. Daniel is a chest physician at the University of Leeds. He has previously led a large study of gut symptoms in people with CF and is now bringing his expertise to GRAMPUS-CF.

Prof Luca Marciani and Prof Penny Gowland. Luca and Penny are physicists at the University of Nottingham. They have great expertise in performing MRI scans of the gut and interpreting these scans.

Prof Robin Spiller. Robin is a Professor of gastroenterology at the University of Nottingham. Over several decades he has studied gut symptoms and their causes in a wide variety of medical conditions. He is bringing this expertise to CF.

Prof Chris van der Gast. Chris is a microbiologist at Northumbria University. Chris has previously helped us with research which looks at the populations of germs living in the gut of people with CF. Chris is helping us plan and deliver the larger and more ambitious GRAMPUS-CF study.

Dr Tanya Monaghan and Dr Niharika Duggal. Tanya is a gastroenterologist at the University of Nottingham. Tanya studies inflammation in the gut and has a special interest in germs like Clostridium difficile (“C. diff”). Niharika is based at the University of Birmingham and studies inflammation in the lab.

Dr Iain Stewart. Iain works at Imperial College London where he is an expert in statistics. He will help us to crunch the numbers to understand symptom patterns and the underlying causes of these patterns of symptoms.

Yes indeed. We will learn a lot from everyone who takes part - whether or not they have troublesome gut symptoms.

We will ask you to fill in questionnaires on 3 occasions 6 months apart. You can also do this using a mobile phone app.

We will ask for a blood sample (25ml or 5 teaspoons) on 3 occasions 6 months apart. The blood test will be done in clinic.

We would also like a stool (poo) sample on each occasion. This can be done in clinic or at home after clinic. We have a kit to help you collect stool and to post the sample.

For the MRI study (group C) we would like you to have done the questionnaires (group A) and the blood and stool samples (group B) first. We will then provide you with all the details of what the MRI scans involve and ask for your consent for group C.

The MRI scans will involve a day spent in Nottingham at the Sir Peter Mansfield Imaging Centre. Adult participants have 11 scans over a period of 6 hours. We have a comfortable waiting room with WiFi for your use between scans. There will be no other CF patients at the centre on the day you visit. We will provide 2 standardised meals and we can cover travel expenses. We can only offer this opportunity to 40 patients.

Taking part in GRAMPUS-CF may not help you directly but we hope that, at the end of the study, we will be able to better understand the reasons behind tummy symptoms in CF. We will then identify suitable treatments to test in clinical trials.

Yes! The questionnaires are quick and can be done remotely on the app (group A). Some people with CF who have done the questionnaires are also happy to provide a blood sample and stool (poo) specimen (group B).

Our next step will be to test treatments which we will choose, based on what we have discovered about the underlying causes. Our ability to do this will depend on funding for a future study.

If you email us at grampuscf@nottingham.ac.uk, your email will be picked up by Darren (Research Dietitian - Nottingham) and Hisham (Medical Research Fellow - Leeds). One of them will get back to you as soon as possible.