The Natural History of Lung Function in Asthma and COPD

Speaker: Yunus Çolak, MD, PhD, DMSc

Dr. Çolak is a Danish clinical researcher with an MD, PhD, and DMSc from the University of Copenhagen, and currently a specialist registrar in respiratory medicine at Copenhagen University Hospitals. His research concerns mostly on the role and importance of lung function in COPD and asthma where he often utilises the two large-scale population-based cohorts the Copenhagen General Population Study and Copenhagen City Heart Study.

However, he has also focused on other topics such inflammatory biomarkers, smoking, chronic cough, and pneumonia. In recent years, Dr. Çolak has been particularly interested in the very early stages of COPD to identify a pre-disease state “pre-COPD” as well as early-life risk factors such as childhood asthma and respiratory tract infections. Besides using traditional clinical epidemiology including cross-sectional and prospective study designs, he also uses genetic epidemiology including Mendelian randomisation to investigate causal risk factors.

Dr. Çolak has contributed with more than 60 peer-reviewed original articles in the respiratory field despite his young age. He is currently involved in the ERS clinical research collaboration CADSET, where the objective is to determine the natural history of lung function in COPD and asthma.