The continuing “1000 faces of asthma”

The continuing challenge to reduce the burden of occupational asthma.

W ith the reduction in the disease burden from the pneumoconioses in recent years, especially in developed countries, occupational asthma has emerged as the occupational lung disease of greatest importance. It is usually the most common respiratory condition reported in occupational disease surveillance programmes and makes a substantial contribution to the burden of asthma in the community, wi...

Is big beautiful? The continuing story of ADAM33 and asthma.

T he gene encoding A Disintegrin And Metalloprotease (ADAM) 33 was the first asthma susceptibility gene to be discovered by positional cloning. In 460 families enriched with asthma, linkage analysis using microsatellite markers spaced ,9 cM apart revealed a region on chromosome 20p13 that carried one or more asthma genes, achieving a Maximum Lod Score (MLS) of 2.24 at 9.99 cM. The addition of f...

Clinical trial for Fabry disease faces continuing hurdles.

The 1000 Canadian faces of systemic lupus erythematosus: effect of ethnicity on baseline pediatric data

Methods Childhood-onset SLE (<18 birthday) patients at four pediatric centers (Halifax, Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver). Collected data included sociodemographics, disease manifestations, current/past medications, laboratory measures and multiple disease measures. The Child Health Questionnaire (CHQ), measuring multiple domains of health status was administered. For analysis, patients were cat...

Continuing the debate about measuring asthma in population studies.

The reasons for measuring atopy and airway hyperresponsiveness (AHR) and the methods of validating measurements of asthma in population studies continue to be debated. The debate has centred around standards against which to validate asthma measurements but the absence of a "gold standard" makes the criterion validation of measurements difficult. Questionnaires will always be useful but cannot ...