BACKGROUND Pulmonary fibrosis may result from abnormal alveolar wound repair after injury. Hepatocyte growth factor (HGF) improves alveolar epithelial wound repair in the lung. Stem cells were shown to play a major role in lung injury, repair and fibrosis. We studied the presence, origin and antifibrotic properties of HGF-expressing stem cells in usual interstitial pneumonia. METHODS Immunohi...

BACKGROUND Few studies have reported the diagnostic variability in patients with a possible usual interstitial pneumonia (UIP) pattern on high-resolution CT (HRCT) who underwent surgical lung biopsy (SLB), and the prognostic factors for these patients have not been fully evaluated. We retrospectively investigated the frequency of idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF) and prognostic factors in pat...

OBJECTIVE To evaluate the usefulness of an automated system for quantification and discrimination of usual interstitial pneumonia (UIP) and nonspecific interstitial pneumonia (NSIP). MATERIALS AND METHODS An automated system to quantify six regional high-resolution CT (HRCT) patterns: normal, NL; ground-glass opacity, GGO; reticular opacity, RO; honeycombing, HC; emphysema, EMPH; and consolid...

Forage proteins are degraded rapidly by rumen microorganisms and therefore supply relatively small quantities of undegraded intake protein (UIP). Growing cattle with high metabolizable protein requirements and lactating beef and dairy cows respond to UIP supplementation when fed high-forage diets, even though degradable intake protein (DIP) is adequate. This observation suggests that an accurat...

Free radicals have been suggested to play an important role in the pathogenesis of interstitial lung diseases, the most important of which are chronic interstitial pneumonias such as usual interstitial pneumonia (UIP) and desquamative interstitial pneumonia (DIP) and granulomatous lung diseases such as sarcoidosis. Because manganese superoxide dismutase (MnSOD) and catalase are two important in...

Idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF), which has the histological pattern of usual interstitial pneumonia (UIP), is a progressive interstitial lung disease with a poor prognosis. Idiopathic interstitial pneumonias with a histological pattern of nonspecific interstitial pneumonia (NSIP) have a better prognosis than UIP, and may present with a clinical picture identical to IPF. The authors hypothes...

AIMS Autoimmune conditions such as rheumatoid arthritis-related interstitial lung disease (RA-ILD) have been linked to the existence of emphysema in never-smokers. We aimed to quantify emphysema prevalence in RA-ILD never-smokers and investigate whether combined pulmonary fibrosis and emphysema (CPFE) results in a worsened prognosis independent of baseline disease extent. METHODS RA-ILD patie...

Destruction of subepithelial basement membrane is a key event in the pathogenesis of idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF). To evaluate the role of matrix metalloproteinases (MMPs) in parenchymal remodeling in idiopathic interstitial pneumonia (IIP), we studied MMP-2 and -9 activity, in bronchoalveolar lavage fluid (BALF) by zymography and the expression of MMP-2 and -9 and TIMP-2 in lung tissue ...

To elucidate which cells are synthesizing tenascin in usual interstitial pneumonia (UIP) we have analyzed thoracoscopic or open lung biopsies from 30 patients with UIP by mRNA in situ hybridization, using (35)S-labeled tenascin RNA probes. The phenotype of the cells expressing tenascin mRNA was confirmed by immunohistochemical stainings of serial sections with antibodies against alpha-smooth mu...

This study was performed to find the rationale for administering steroids to patients with idiopathic interstitial pneumonia (IIP), which was unlikely to be usual interstitial pneumonia (UIP) but was not surgically biopsied. Among IIP patients in the file of the departments, nine patients who met the following criteria were selected for this study ("non-UIP" group): 1) transbronchial lung biops...