Immunity is responsible for the defense mechanism of the body but in case of autoimmune diseases, its role gets diverted. Like so many other diseases, asthma is also considered as one of the most common autoimmune diseases to be occurring in community. Asthma is defined as a chronic inflammatory airway disease that is characterized by airway hyper reactivity and mucus hypersecretion that result...

Cough is the most common complaint for which patients seek medical attention. Cough variant asthma (CVA) is a form of asthma, which presents solely with cough. CVA is one of the most common causes of chronic cough. More importantly, 30 to 40% of adult patients with CVA, unless adequately treated, may progress to classic asthma. CVA shares a number of pathophysiological features with classic ast...

In a prospective study on a cohort of 7 year old children of low birth weight (under 2000 g at birth), we observed an increased prevalence of airway responsiveness to histamine compared with a reference population of unselected, local schoolchildren. The airway responsiveness to histamine was significantly related to a history of asthma in first degree relatives (natural parents and siblings) i...

The effect of treatment with topical inhaled corticosteroids was assessed in 15 children of low birth weight (mean (SD) birth weight 1435 (268) g, gestational age 30.5 (2.9) weeks, age at study 8.2 (0.4) years) who were symptomatic and showed a positive airway response to histamine aerosol. The study was of a double blind, placebo controlled, crossover design with four week long treatment perio...

The inhalation therapy is a cornerstone in asthma treatment. A disease characterized by episodes of wheezing, breathing difficulties, chest tightness and coughing. Essentially it is a chronic inflammatory disorder associated with airway hyper responsiveness [1]. This disease already affects over 300 million people worldwide, growing at a rate of 50% per decade, and causes the death of 220 thous...

Ten years ago most researchers in Western countries “knew” what caused asthma, and we knew how to prevent it.1 Asthma was an atopic disease caused by allergen exposure. The fundamental etiological mechanism was that allergen exposure, particularly in infancy, produced atopic sensitization and continued exposure resulted in asthma through the development of eosinophilic airway inflammation, bron...

Methods Inhibition of CRAC channel activity in Jurkat cells, cytokine release from human whole blood or PBMC, and mast cell degranulation were estimated. In vivo efficacy of the compound was determined in experimental models of asthma in guinea pigs including PAF or ovalbumin induced eosinophil infiltration into lungs ovalbumin induced histamine release from mast cells, and airway hyper-respons...

In the present study, we investigated whether extracellular sphingosine 1-phosphate (S1P) is involved in airway hyper-reactivity in bronchial asthma. The effects of S1P on the response to methacholine was examined in the fura-2-loaded strips of guinea pig tracheal smooth muscle using simultaneous recording of the isometric tension and the ratio of fluorescence intensities at 340 and 380 nm (F(3...