COUNTERPOINT: Will New Anti-eosinophilic Drugs Be Useful in Asthma Management? No

Counterpoint: Is measuring sputum eosinophils useful in the management of severe asthma? No, not for the vast majority of patients.

Financial/nonfinancial disclosures: The author has reported to CHEST the following conflicts of interest: Dr Peters has been a member of the Wake Forest Clinical Trials Group, which has performed clinical trials for Ception/Cephalon, GlaxoSmithKline, and Medimmune examining the effect of anti-IL5 therapies in patients with severe asthma.Reproduction of this article is prohibited without written...

How Useful Will Functional Proteomics Data Be?

Large-scale protein interaction maps are, with gene expression profiles, among the first examples of data sets generated without specific knowledge on functions of genes. These are technology-driven experiments rather than hypothesis-driven experiments. They are valuable tools for protein function prediction, despite the occurrence of typical artifacts. These approaches are still in their early...

Use of anti-asthma drugs in New Zealand.

Increased sales of anti-asthma drugs, and a second "epidemic" of asthma mortality, raised concerns about the management of asthma in New Zealand. To study this, prescriptions were obtained from randomly selected pharmacies to identify 235 patients receiving one common anti-asthma drug, 175 of whom were willing to be interviewed. The authors considered that 80% had asthma, and only 20% suffered ...

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New drugs for asthma.

The goal of asthma therapy is to reduce symptoms to the extent that patients can lead active, unlimited lives and to minimize concern about exacerbations. Unfortunately, despite advances in our understanding of the pathophysiology of asthma and the existence of consensus asthma-management guidelines, patients with asthma still suffer considerable morbidity and, on rare occasions, death. Part of...