Background Asthma is a disease of varying severity and differing disease mechanisms. To date, studies aimed at stratifying asthma into clinically useful phenotypes have produced a number of phenotypes that have yet to be assessed for stability and to be validated in independent cohorts. The aim of this study was to define and validate, for the first time ever, clinically driven...
Aims To quantify the extent of squamous metaplasia in bronchial biopsies and relate it to the presence of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), a smoking-related pathology. Methods Bronchial biopsies (n = 15 in each group) from smokers with COPD GOLD stage1 and GOLD stage2, smokers without COPD and healthy non-smokers were stained immunohistochemically with a panel of...
Macrophages are essential to maintaining lung homoeostasis and recent work has demonstrated that influenza-infected lung macrophages downregulate their expression of the scavenger receptor CD36. This receptor has also been shown to be involved in phagocytosis of Streptococcus pneumoniae, a primary agent associated with pneumonia secondary to viral infection. The aim of this study...
Background Smoking cessation is the best possible way to prevent the progression of smoking related airway diseases. However, the effect and time scale of smoking cessation on airway inflammation/remodelling are largely unknown. This prospective study evaluated the effects of smoking cessation on induced sputum (IS) neutrophils, matrix metalloproteinases (MMP-7, -8, -9) and...
