The prevalence of asthma in children is increasing worldwide. Although the features of asthma are well documented, defining asthma remains a problem. The clinical definition of asthma does not take into account the concept of airway inflammation. A broader definition that incorporates the inflammatory process, reversibility of airway obstruction, and airway responsiveness needs to be more widel...

Recurrent early life wheeze is not always asthma, and up to 50% of children are reported to remit. With reports of adult asthma symptom relapse, we assessed the prognosis of recurrent bronchial obstruction (rBO) through adolescence in the Environment and Childhood Asthma (ECA) prospective birth cohort study. The present study is based on data from investigations at ages 2, 10 and 16 years of 55...

Benign neoplasms of the endobronchial tree are uncommon, and among them lipomas are the most uncommon. Endobronchial lipoma is histologically benign in character but may cause bronchial obstruction. We describe a 47-year-old woman with an endobronchial lipoma arising from the right main bronchus which was treated as asthma for 4 years.

Emphysema and asthma are two chronic lung diseases which are often together associated with chronic bronchitis. The interrelationship of these three conditions is complex and poorly understood, but there is a great surge of interest in this field which presents a vast clinical problem in an ageing population. Asthma is due to transient narrowing of large air tubes caused by acute mucosal swelli...

Coke-oven workers are exposed to dust and irritant gases. Therefore they are at risk of developing lung diseases including chronic bronchitis. Nonspecific bronchial hyperresponsiveness (BHR) has been advocated as a potential risk factor predisposing to the development of chronic bronchitis. In a previous study, we showed that prevalence of BHR was higher in retired coke-oven workers than in ret...

OBJECTIVES To investigate the prevalence of airways obstruction and bronchial reactivity to inhaled methacholine in rheumatoid arthritis patients and unselected controls. The control population consisted of patients attending the rheumatology department for minor degenerative joint problems. METHODS One hundred patients with rheumatoid arthritis (RA) [72 (72%) women, 28 (28%) men; mean (SD) a...

Bronchial hyperresponsiveness (BHR), i.e. increased narrowing of the airways after exposure to non-allergic stimuli, is a hallmark of asthma. BHR is a risk factor for asthma development and, additionally, a marker of worse disease outcome in asthma [1, 2]. It is generally acknowledged that obstruction of the large airways due to inflammation and remodelling contributes to more severe BHR. This ...

Artificial pneumothorax is generally regarded as a reversible procedure, and usually i t is. Comparatively little attention has been directed however, to the fact that when it is stopped, very seldom does the lung fully re-expand. Pinner, Leiner and ZavodD remark that the term "re-expansion" is a misnomer. Often the affected portion of the lung remains permanently collapsed, and the portion of ...

Allergic asthma is usually diagnosed by the presence of variable airway obstruction, bronchial hyperresponsiveness, and allergy. However, a significant proportion of adult asthma patients (up to 40%) are non-allergic. Patients with non-allergic asthma often have a later disease onset and greater disease severity, as reflected by more severe airway obstruction and bronchial hyperresponsiveness. ...