Little is known about causes of death in chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and the validity of mortality statistics in COPD. The present authors examined causes of death using data from the Copenhagen City Heart Study. Of the 12,979 subjects with sufficient data from the baseline examination during 1976-1978, 6,709 died before 2001. Of these, 242 died with COPD as cause of death. Amo...

The lungs are continuously exposed to inhaled particles and irritants. Tobacco smoking is the leading cause of several airway diseases, including lung cancer, idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). In COPD, repeated exposure to cigarette smoke induces chronic inflammation and structural remodelling of the airways, with peribronchial fibrosis and epitheli...

This review discusses biomarkers that are being researched for their usefulness to phenotype chronic inflammatory lung diseases that cause remodeling of the lung's architecture. The review focuses on asthma, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), and pulmonary hypertension. Bio-markers of environmental exposure and specific classes of biomarkers (noncoding RNA, metabolism, vitamin, coagu...

The epithelial–mesenchymal trophic unit (EMTU) is a morphofunctional entity involved in the maintenance of homeostasis airways as well pathogenesis several diseases, including asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). “muco-microbiotic layer” (MML) innermost layer made by microbiota elements (bacteria, viruses, archaea fungi) surrounding mucous matrix. MML also crucial for mainta...

BACKGROUND The Korean Obstructive Lung Disease (KOLD) Cohort Study is a prospective longitudinal study of patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), asthma, or other unclassified obstructive lung diseases. It was designed to develop new classification models and biomarkers that predict clinically relevant outcomes for patients with obstructive lung diseases. METHODS Patients ...

Pneumomediastinum, defined as the presence of air in mediastinum often occurs due to trauma, mechanical ventilation or surgical procedure. It may also occur spontaneously predisposing lung diseases such asthma and Chronic obstructive pulmonary airway disease (COPD). In this report, we present a case patient with COVID-19 pneumonia without any underlying conditions usual risk factors for pneumom...

BACKGROUND Oxidative stress plays a role in the pathogenesis of many chronic inflammatory lung diseases. Exhaled breath condensate (EBC) collection is a noninvasive method to investigate pulmonary oxidative stress biomarkers such as malondialdehyde (MDA). SUBJECTS AND METHODS We measured MDA levels in EBC in a large number of patients (N = 194) with respiratory diseases: asthma (N = 64), bron...

Asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) are very common inflammatory diseases of the airways. They both cause airway narrowing and are increasing in incidence throughout the world, imposing enormous burdens on health care. Cytokines play a key role in orchestrating the chronic inflammation and structural changes of the respiratory tract in both asthma and COPD and have become im...

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...