An asthma flare-up, which some people call an asthma attack or episode, happens when a person's airways get swollen and narrower and it becomes a lot harder for air to get in and out of the lungs. Asthma affects about 1 or 2 kids out of 10. Asthma is one disease that children start to develop even before the age of 5. This asthma is very difficult to diagnose during the young age. Most of the t...

What are the symptoms? You may have any of the following: • Shortness of breath, trouble breathing, or fast breathing • Trouble doing normal activities, such as exercising, playing sports, or doing chores that involve lifting • Trouble talking • Fingers or lips turning blue or gray • A peak flow rate (how fast you can blow air out of your lungs) less than 80 percent of your personal best • Tigh...

BACKGROUND Little is known about the associations between symptoms of asthma, pulmonary function tests, and atopy in developing countries. While asthma in children is often associated with atopy, some studies of wheezing illness have found little or no association, leading to suggestions that there are subgroups of wheezing illness. The ISAAC study recently reported that the prevalence of repor...

BACKGROUND The fractional concentration of nitric oxide in exhaled air (FENO) is used as a biomarker of eosinophilic airway inflammation. FENO is increased in patients with asthma. The relationship between subjective asthma symptoms and airway inflammation is an important issue. We expected that the subjective asthma symptoms in women might be different from those in men. Therefore, we investig...

Clues of the pressurised metered-dose inhaler in the left shirt pocket and the right upper lobe fibrosis should prompt the reader to consider the unifying diagnosis of allergic broncho-pulmonary aspergillosis (fig. 1). This 48-yr-old male had difficult-to-control asthma with elevated serum immunoglo-bulin E levels, presence of aspergillus immunoglobulin E antibodies, and the occurrence of centr...

Understanding asthma pathophysiology can directly help researchers and physicians pinpoint mechanisms that govern airway hyperresponsiveness and effectively treat complex respiratory diseases such as asthma. The advancement in this research field has been prompted by the usage of medical imaging technology and computational modeling providing a subjectspecific, noninvasive assessment of respira...

BACKGROUND Severe life threatening asthma (SLTA) is important in its own right and as a proxy for asthma death. In order to target hospital based intervention strategies to those most likely to benefit, risk factors for SLTA among those admitted to hospital need to be identified. A case-control study was undertaken to determine whether, in comparison with patients admitted to hospital with acut...