Zhang Yang

nicolezyyy@163.com

A RESPIRATORY disease center jointly launched by the University of Hong Kong-Shenzhen Hospital (HKU-SZH) and Imperial College London’s National Heart and Lung Institute (NHLI) was inaugurated at the hospital yesterday.

As part of Shenzhen’s “3R Project” for introducing medical experts and resources from outside the city to help improve local health-care services, the cooperation between the HKU-SZH and NHLI will be rolled out in different levels to improve clinical services, training and research related to respiratory diseases on both sides.

The hospital will be closely working with a medical team led by Prof. Fan Chung from NHLI in four fields, including obstructive sleep apnea syndrome, asthma, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and chronic coughing.

“I think it’s a huge opportunity for us to study something new in respiratory diseases, which are causing such a lot of problems in China,” said Prof. Peter J. Barnes, a core member of the medical team and head of respiratory medicine at Imperial College London.

According to Prof. Barnes, chronic lung diseases pose a great threat to the public’s health as they cause one in six deaths worldwide, while COPD is the third most common cause of death with a prevalence of nearly 10 percent globally.

Imperial College London has the largest medical school in Europe, and it has been ranked as one of the world’s 10 best universities for many years. The NHLI is one of the largest heart and lung departments in the world, with over 80 project leaders and 400 researchers.

Christopher Hui, head of respiratory medicine at HKU-SZH, said that the medical experts at NHLI and the University of Hong Kong will come to the hospital on a regular basis to exchange experiences and medical achievements with each another.

The hospital’s respiratory medicine department received over 33,000 outpatients last year. A smoking cessation clinic was set up at the hospital in January 2015, which has helped nearly 40 percent of patients successfully quit smoking.