The role of cigarette smoking in the development and outcome of pulmonary fibrosis is uncertain. In this study, we aimed to assess the effect of route of bleomycin exposure in the development of pulmonary fibrosis and the effects of cigarette smoke on bleomycin-induced lung fibrosis. We studied five groups of rats; 1-control group, 2-intratracheal bleomycin (IT), 3intratracheal bleomycin plus c...

Wnt signaling pathways are tightly controlled under a physiological condition, under which they play key roles in many biological functions, including cell fate specification and tissue regeneration. Increasing lines of evidence recently demonstrated that a dysregulated activation of Wnt signaling, particularly the Wnt/β-catenin signaling, was involved in the pathogenesis of chronic pulmonary d...

INTRODUCTION The objective was to characterize the clinical and myopathologic features of patients with scleroderma-polymyositis (SSc-PM) overlap compared with a population of patients with systemic sclerosis (SSc) and polymyositis (PM). METHODS A three-way comparison of patients with SSc-PM overlap (n = 25) with patients with SSc (n = 397) and PM (n = 40) on clinical and myopathologic featur...

New paradigms have been recently proposed in the pathogenesis of both chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF), evidencing surprising similarities between these deadly diseases, despite their obvious clinical, radiological and pathologic differences. There is growing evidence supporting a "double hit" pathogenic model where in both COPD and IPF the cu...

Studies of human tissue have suggested an association between productive Epstein Barr virus and idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF). However, a pathogenic role for the virus has not been established. This study was undertaken to develop an animal model, which would explore the association between viral infection and pulmonary fibrosis. BALB/c mice (n=30), resistant to bleomycin, were primed wit...

Pulmonary fibrosis is a progressive, disabling disease with mortality rates that appear to be increasing in the western population, including the USA. There are over 140 known causes of pulmonary fibrosis as well as many unknown causes. Treatment options for this disease are limited due to poor understanding of the molecular mechanisms of the disease progression. However, recent progress in inf...