Hubert Chen , MD, MPH
Assistant Professor in Residence

University of California San Francisco
350 Parnassus Ave. Suite 609
Mailbox 0924
San Francisco, California 94143-0924

Appointments: 415-353-2961
Research only: 415-502-6765

Dr. Chen received his M.D. from Stanford School of Medicine in 1998 and completed his residency in Internal Medicine at Stanford University Hospital & Clinics.  After residency, he attended the Harvard School of Public Health and received his M.P.H. degree in Quantitative Methods.  He then came to UCSF where he completed his fellowship in Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine, followed by post-doctoral research training at the Cardiovascular Research Institute.  Prior to joining the UCSF faculty in 2007, Dr. Chen spent a year at Genentech as a visiting clinical scientist.  He is currently funded through an NIH/NHLBI sponsored K23 award to study health-related quality of life in patients with pulmonary arterial hypertension.  Dr. Chen’s clinical activities include attending in the Chest Faculty Practice Clinic and in the Intensive Care Unit.

Research Activities

Dr. Chen’s main research interest is the study of health-related quality of life (HRQoL) in patients with chronic respiratory impairment.  While medical research has traditionally focused on physiologically-defined endpoints, there is growing recognition that such endpoints correlate poorly with how patients actually feel.  Moreover, such endpoints rarely take into account those issues patients consider most important.  In order to adopt a more patient-centered approach, various types of HRQoL instruments have been developed and are being increasingly applied in population-based studies, economic analyses, and clinical trials.  Dr. Chen’s research focuses on the psychometric evaluation of instruments used to quantify HRQoL impairment in respiratory disease.  Dr. Chen has studied HRQoL in a variety airway disorders, however, his primary research centers on two conditions characterized by chronic respiratory impairment: severe asthma and pulmonary arterial hypertension.

Severe Asthma.  Achieving symptom control in patients with severe asthma can be very difficult.  Patients with severe asthma suffer from frequent exacerbations and may experience symptoms on a daily basis, even in spite of aggressive medical therapy.  Current practice guidelines now support the use of patient-reported measures to help guide asthma management.  Dr. Chen’s research seeks to provide greater understanding of the interrelationships among different types of health status measures used to assess asthma severity, asthma control, and asthma-specific HRQoL.  In particular, his work focuses on evaluating the performance characteristics of these various measures in relation to other health outcomes, such as exacerbations, health care utilization, and productivity loss.  For his research, Dr Chen collaborates with a multi-disciplinary group of investigators at UCSF using data from a well-established prospective cohort study of patients with asthma.  In addition, Dr. Chen collaborates with scientists at Genentech on the TENOR study, a registry of patients with severe or difficult-to-treat asthma recruited from specialty practices across the U.S.  The goal of Dr. Chen’s research is to find valid and reliable measures that can be used to help identify and treat those factors which lead to HRQoL impairment in patients with severe asthma.

Pulmonary Arterial Hypertension.  PAH is a disorder of the pulmonary vasculature that is associated with profound dyspnea and exercise limitation.  The recent development of effective medical therapy has begun to transform this once rapidly lethal disease into a chronic condition characterized by progressive respiratory impairment.  As with other chronic conditions, the goals of therapy have broadened to include improving HRQoL.  Unfortunately, limited information exists on the utility of HRQoL instruments in PAH.  Also, little is known about how psychosocial factors mediate the effect of treatment on HRQoL.  Dr. Chen intends to address these knowledge gaps by using a mixed methods approach that combines both quantitative and qualitative research techniques.  The quantitative component of his research builds upon an existing prospective cohort study of patients treated for PAH at UCSF.  The qualitative component consists of focus groups conducted among a subset of these patients.  The specific aims of Dr Chen’s research are: (1) To determine how HRQoL relates to clinical measures of disease severity in PAH over time, (2) To determine if HRQoL predicts health care utilization, lung transplant, and death in PAH, and (3) To describe the impact of psychosocial factors on HRQoL in patients with severe PAH.  The results of his research will inform the development of future PAH-specific HRQoL measures, thereby enabling investigators to accurately determine which medical interventions benefit patients most.

Recent Publications

Chen H, Katz PP, Eisner MD, Yelin EH, Blanc PD. Health-related quality of life in adult rhinitis: The role of perceived control of disease. J Allergy Clin Immunol. 2004; 114(4): 845-850.

Chen H, Katz PP, Shiboski S, Blanc PD. Evaluating change in health-related quality of life in adult rhinitis: Responsiveness of the Rhinosinusitis Disability Index. Health Qual Life Outcomes. 2005; 3(1):68:1-11.

Chen H, Eisner MD, Katz PP, Yelin EH, Blanc PD. Measuring disease-specific quality of life in obstructive airway disease: Validation of a modified version of the Airways Questionnaire 20 (AQ20). Chest. 2006; 129(6):1644-1652.

Chen H, Gould MK, Blanc PD, Miller DP, Kamath TV, Lee JH, Sullivan SD. Asthma control, severity, and quality of life: Quantifying the effect of uncontrolled disease. J Allergy Clin Immunol. 2007; 120(2):396-402.

Chen H, Blanc PD, Hayden M-L, Bleecker ER, Chawla A, Lee JH. Assessing productivity loss and activity impairment in severe or difficult-to-treat asthma. Value in Health. 2008; 11(2):231-239.

Peters AT, Klemens JC, Haselkorn T, Weiss ST, Grammer LC, Lee JH, Chen H. Insurance status and asthma-related healthcare utilization in patients with severe asthma. Ann Allergy Asthma Immunol. 2008; 100:301-307.

Chen H, Johnson CA, Haselkorn T, Lee JH, Israel E. Subspecialty differences in asthma characteristics and management. Mayo Clin Proc. 2008; 83(7):786-793.

Chen H, Taichman DB, Doyle, RL. Health-related quality of life and patient-reported outcomes in pulmonary arterial hypertension. Proc Am Thoracic Soc. 2008; 5(5):623-630.

Chen H, Shiboski SC, Golden JA, Gould MK, Hays SR, Hoopes CW, De Marco T. Impact of the Lung Allocation Score on lung transplantation for pulmonary arterial hypertension. Am J Respir Crit Care Med. 2009; 180(5):468-74.

Haselkorn T, Chen H, Miller DP, Fish JE, Peters SP, Weiss ST, Jones CA. Asthma control and activity limitations: insights from the Real-world Evaluation of Asthma Control and Treatment (REACT) study. Ann Allergy Asthma Immunol. 2010;104(6):471-7.

Katz PP, Chen H, Omachi TA, Gregorich SE, Julian LJ, Cisternas MG, Balmes JR, Blanc PD. The role of physical inactivity in increasing disability among older adults with obstructive airway disease. J Cardiopulm Rehabil Prev. 2011. [In Press]

Chen H, Cisternas MG, Katz PP, Omachi TA, Trupin L, Yelin EH, Balmes JR, Blanc PD. Evaluating quality of life in patients with asthma and rhinitis: English adaptation of the Rhinasthma Questionnaire. Ann Allergy Asthma Immunol. 2011 Feb;106(2):110-118.e1. [Epub 2011 Jan 8].

Chen H, De Marco T, Kobashigawa EA, Katz PP, Chang VW, Blanc PD. Comparison of cardiac and pulmonary-specific quality of life measures in pulmonary hypertension. Eur Respir J. 2011 Jan 27. [Epub ahead of print]

Brown LM, Chen H, Halpern S, Taichman D, McGoon M, Farber HW, Frost A, Liou TG, Turner M, Feldkircher K, Miller DP, Elliott CG. Delay in recognition of pulmonary arterial hypertension: Factors identified from the REVEAL registry. Chest. 2011. [In Press]