A standardized clinical database for research in Chagas disease: The NHEPACHA network

Abstract

The:NHEPACHA Iberoamerican Network, founded the initiative of a group of researchers from Latin American countries and Spain, aims to establish a research framework for Cha-gas disease that encompasses diagnosis and treatment. For this purpose, the network has created a questionnaire to gather relevant data on epidemiological, clinical, diagnostic, and therapeutic aspects of the disease. This questionnaire was developed based on a consen-sus of expert members of the network, with the intention of collecting high-quality standardized data, which can be used interchangeably by the different research centers that make up the NHEPACHA network. Furthermore, the network intends to offer a clinical protocol that can be embraced by other researchers, facilitating comparability among published stud-ies, as well as the development of therapeutic response and progression markers.