All news from Thoracic Medicine
Using freshly resected lung tissue from 21 patients and two distinct mouse models, tuberculosis researchers at the University of Alabama at Birmingham and the Africa Health Research Institute, or AHRI, have identified a protein that plays an essential role in host defense against this deadly disease. This research was published in the journal Cell Reports
Scientists from the University of Sheffield have discovered a new inhibitor which decreases lung inflammation and could hold the key to treating Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome – a life-threatening disease which affects thousands of people in the UK.
Researchers at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), National Jewish Health and Pediatric Pneumology Center in Puerto Rico have been awarded nearly $ 10 million as part of a 5-year grant from the US National Heart Lung and Blood Institute, where asthma prevalence and deaths are among the highest in the world. The team plans to follow the children from birth through early childhood to study how genes and viral infections affect respiratory disease.
Southampton researcher, Dr. Michael Head, is calling for immediate action to tackle pneumonia after a new report named the condition as the leading disease in the killer in the world, claiming an estimated 2.6 million lives in 2017
For healthy people, mucus is our friend. It traps potential pathogens so our airways can dispatch nasty bugs before they cause harm to our lungs. But for people with conditions such as cystic fibrosis (CF) and chronic obstructive pulmonary disorder (COPD), mucus can get too thick and sticky; coughing alone can not clear it Infections develop, leading to severe chronic disease and early death.
Now, for the first time, scientists at the UNC School of Medicine and Duke University demonstrated why coughing often can not tear mucus apart and away from the airway lining. And they showed how to make mucus thinner and less sticky so coughing can become a therapeutic aid.
A descriptive review of 156 full-text papers on drug-induced interstitial lung disease (DIILD) shows that there is an absence of high-quality data on the disease, causing great difficulty in assessing its impact on patients.
Babies with cystic fibrosis may breathe better by inhaling hypertonic saline, according to a randomized controlled trial conducted in Germany. Babies with cystic fibrosis may breathe better by inhaling hypertonic saline, according to a randomized controlled trial conducted in Germany and published in the American Thoracic Society's American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine.
Use of angiotensin converting enzyme inhibitor drugs (ACEIs) to lower blood pressure is associated with an increased risk of lung cancer compared with use of another group of blood pressure drugs called angiotensin receptor blockers (ARBs), finds a study in The BMJ.
A group of Brazilian researchers succeeded in preventing allergic asthma from progressing in experimental models by increasing the amount of a protein. This increase, in turn, blocked the CD4+ T lymphocytes responsible for producing a cytokine that triggers a cascade of events resulting in the onset and progression of the disease. The results were published in the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology
The majority of patients with cystic fibrosis may not achieve blood concentrations of antibiotics sufficiently high enough to effectively fight bacteria responsible for pulmonary exacerbations, leading to worsening pulmonary function, indicates a study led by researchers. Additionally, the study findings show that it's impossible to predict solely from dosing regimens which patients will achieve therapeutically meaningful antibiotic concentrations in their blood.
Insufficient evidence exists to demonstrate that monotherapy with correctors has clinically important effects in individuals with cystic fibrosis (CF) who have 2 copies of the F508 of the mutation, according to an analysis published in the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews.
In patients with smoking-related lung disease and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), cystic fibrosis transmembrane conductance regulator (CFTR) dysfunction is associated with worsened airway disease, according to a study published in the Annals of the American Thoracic Society.