BACKGROUND Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) has been consistently associated with increased risk of lung cancer. However, previous studies have had limited ability to determine whether the association is due to smoking. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS The Environment And Genetics in Lung cancer Etiology (EAGLE) population-based case-control study recruited 2100 cases and 2120 contr...

The term chronic bronchitis has been criticised because it is associated with hypersecretion of mucus rather than bronchial inflammation. This study was designed to establish the presence or absence of clinical chronic bronchitis and measure pulmonary function in 45 patients about to undergo resection of the lung. The condition in the cartilaginous and small airways and the severity of the emph...

Hypoxic pulmonary vasoconstriction is considered as one of the factors leading to pulmonary hypertension in patients with chronic bronchitis, but the magnitude and the variability of the pulmonary vascular response to hypoxia in these patients have not been well established. We investigated the pulmonary hemodynamic changes induced by breathing two hypoxic mixtures (FIO2 = 0.15 and 0.13) in 26 ...