Pediatric immunologist Maria Jimena Gutierrez and pediatric pulmonologist Christy Sadreameli discuss the multidisciplinary approach to care and research offered at the Childhood Interstitial and Immunological Disorders of the Lung (ChILD/Immune) Clinic at Johns Hopkins. This clinic sees patients with known or suspected interstitial lung diseases or immune diseases affecting the lungs.
The Child Immune clinic is a multidisciplinary clinic led by myself and Doctor Maria Gutierrez, who's an immunologist. Of course, I'm a pediatric pulmonologist. And it's a joint clinic where we see patients with known or suspected interstitial lung diseases, um or immune disorders that are affecting the lungs or people who may have. Um Either one of these, we actually founded this clinic because we realized we were seeing a lot of the same patients and we weren't seeing them together, but we really had to collaborate outside of our usual clinics. So we decided to bring it under one roof and work together in our approach to these patients in this clinic. Um we have focused in on two type of conditions. So as Doctor Saria Meli mentioned, uh we are seeing patients who have a lung disease that we suspect it may have an immunological origin. At the same time, we are seeing patients who have an immune condition that we know affect the lungs. In that way, we can take a proactive approach and diagnose and treat those complications. Early patients to our clinic, come with respiratory symptoms, uh symptoms of a lung problem or with problems. Uh that point to an immune um condition, for example, frequent infections, for example, inflammatory manifestations uh but sometimes they may not have any symptoms. Um in general, we are happy to see any patients when they're treating providers think that they may benefit of us taking a look at them. In this clinic. Dr Sati Meli is a pediatric pulmonologist and I specialized in allergy immunology and pediatric rheumatology. But we interact with many other specialties in the hospital. So this is a truly multidisciplinary program. We have pulmonary function tests, uh including nasal nitric oxide as well as all of the typical complete pulmonary function tests. You could expect we also have respiratory therapist and specialized nursing support. We have case management for durable medical equipment and other needs and we have immunology, molecular and genetic testing as well as social work. Currently, we are a site for the National Child Registry. So the Childhood interstitial Lung Disease registry and we also have our own registry, which is the Johns Hopkins Child Immune Registry that we currently have these two registries. Our vision for the future is to expand our research program and our vision includes an integrated translational research program that can help us better understand the clinical and biologic facets of these rare disorders. And our goal is to improve clinical outcomes
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