Asthma is a common disorder that in 2009 afflicted 8.2% of adults and children, 24.6 million persons, in the United States. In patients with moderate and severe persistent asthma, there is significantly increased morbidity, use of health care support, and health care costs. Epidemiologic studies in the United States and Europe have associated mold sensitivity, particularly to Alternaria alterna...

Bronchial hyperresponsiveness (BHR), i.e. increased narrowing of the airways after exposure to non-allergic stimuli, is a hallmark of asthma. BHR is a risk factor for asthma development and, additionally, a marker of worse disease outcome in asthma [1, 2]. It is generally acknowledged that obstruction of the large airways due to inflammation and remodelling contributes to more severe BHR. This ...

18 patients with idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis were studied to determine if they had morphologic evidence of small airways disease and if physiologic testing could predict morphologic findings. In the presence of normal airway function by standard physiologic studies (forced expiratory volume in 1 s/forced vital capacity and airway resistance by plethysmography), dynamic compliance, maximum exp...

Accurate knowledge of the airway geometry is needed when constructing physical models of the airway tree and for numerical modeling of flow or sound propagation in the airways. Human and animal experiments are conducted to validate these models. Many studies documented the geometric details of the human airways. However, information about the geometry of pig airways is scarcer. Earlier studies ...

Design-based quantitation of the nasal cavity, larynx and tracheobronchial conducting airways after exposure to inhaled toxicants requires complete measurement of all respiratory airways or appropriate sampling followed by morphometric measurements. In vivo imaging (MRI or CT) of the nasal cavity, larynx and conducting airways provides anatomical detail of all the airways down to the distal air...

Asthma is an inflammatory disease and although the existence of small airways disease has been described, a few decades ago, in asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), the possibility that small airway inflammation/remodelling is involved in the pathophysiology and clinical manifestations of these conditions has recently been re-emphasised [1–3]. Previous observations had shown...

Introduction: Obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) is a common disorder characterized by the repetitive collapse of upper airways during sleep, most likely in oropharyngeal region. Anatomical factors significantly contribute to disease development; however, heritability airway dimensions, which lead collapsibility airways, less known. In current study, we aimed quantify impact heritable and environmen...

RATIONALE The chronic rejection of lung allografts is attributable to progressive small airway obstruction. OBJECTIVES To determine precisely the site and nature of this type of airway obstruction. METHODS Lungs from patients with rejected lung allografts treated by a second transplant (n = 7) were compared with unused donor (control) lungs (n = 7) using multidetector computed tomography (M...

While pathological and clinical data suggest that small airways are involved in early cystic fibrosis (CF) lung disease development, little is known about how the lack of cystic fibrosis transmembrane conductance regulator (CFTR) function contributes to disease pathogenesis in these small airways. Large and small airway epithelia are exposed to different airflow velocities, temperatures, humidi...

We present an image functional modeling approach, which synthesizes imaging and mechanical data with anatomically explicit computational models. This approach is utilized to identify the relative importance of small and large airways in the simultaneous deterioration of mechanical function and ventilation in asthma. Positron emission tomographic (PET) images provide the spatial distribution and...