To assess the prevalence of skin test sensitivity among asthmatic patients in Malaysia, skin prick tests for allergy in 134 adult asthmatic patients and 120 control subjects were done. 90% of asthmatic patients had positive skin test to at least one allergens as compared to 78% of the controls. House dust mite was the most frequent allergen to which the subjects had positive reactions. Sixty-fo...

We wanted to determine whether the airway response to inhaled leukotriene C4 (LTC4) is similar to inhaled leukotriene E4 (LTE4) in aspirin-sensitive asthma and, therefore, determined airway responsiveness to histamine, LTC4 and LTE4 in seven aspirin-sensitive subjects and 13 control asthmatic subjects, who were tolerant of aspirin. The concentration of inhaled lysine-aspirin which produced a 15...

BACKGROUND Exacerbations of asthma are associated with viral respiratory tract infections, of which rhinoviruses (RV) are the predominant virus type. Airway smooth muscle is important in asthma pathogenesis, however little is known about the potential interaction of RV and human airway smooth muscle cells (HASM). We hypothesised that rhinovirus induction of inflammatory cytokine release from ai...

This study describes a method of quantitatively characterizing cough sounds using digital signal processing techniques. Differences between asthmatic and non-asthmatic cough sounds are presented. Coughs from 12 asthmatic and 5 non-asthmatic subjects were analysed. Cough sounds and flows were digitized, at a sampling rate of 5 kHz, before and after a free-running exercise test. Individual coughs...

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVE Asthma is associated with airway narrowing in response to bronchoconstricting stimuli and increased airway smooth muscle (ASM) mass. In addition, some studies have suggested impaired β-agonist induced ASM relaxation in asthmatics, but the mechanism is not known. OBJECTIVE To characterize the potential defect in β-agonist induced cAMP in ASM derived from asthmatic in c...

BACKGROUND Excess body mass increases the risk of development of asthmatic symptoms and their severity and decreases the treatment effectiveness. One of the hypotheses explaining the link between the two diseases concerns the adipokines, hormones produced by adipose tissue with a proinflammatory character. The aim of this study was to compare the levels of the adipokines (leptin and resistin) b...

Asthma remains the most common chronic disease in childhood, reportedly Abstract affecting up to 25% of children in Western urban environmental settings. There seems to be a common perception that asthmatic children have a reduced capacity for exercise. Surprisingly, there is conflicting evidence in the literature in relation to this position. In this review, we present an overview of the liter...

Appreciable numbers of aspirin-sensitive asthmatic patients have chronic steroid-dependent severe asthmatic symptoms. We report four cases of aspirin-sensitive asthmatics who had mild to severe asthmatic symptoms, whose methacholine PC20 level ranged from 0.6 to 22 mg/ml at the first visit. The aspirin sensitivity was confirmed by lysine-aspirin bronchoprovocation. After anti-asthmatic medicati...

β2-adrenergic receptor (β2AR) agonists (β2-agonist) are the most commonly used therapy for acute relief in asthma, but chronic use of these bronchodilators paradoxically exacerbates airway hyper-responsiveness. Activation of βARs by β-agonist leads to desensitization (inactivation) by phosphorylation through G-protein coupled receptor kinases (GRKs) which mediate β-arrestin binding and βAR inte...

dietary fatty acids play a critical role in modulation of airway inflammation in asthma. this study was conducted to compare dietary intakes of essential fatty acids and serum levels of inflammatory factors in asthmatic and healthy adults, and to examine the potential relationship between inflammatory markers and dietary fatty acids. in this case-control study, 47 asthmatic patients (26 males a...