Health selection within a workforce has been found in several industries and appears to be more pronounced in dustier occupations. In this study of airway disease among workers exposed to asbestos and man made mineral fibres, 215 of 246 construction insulators 50 years old or less and currently working in the Montreal area were examined. Spirometry was completed successfully in 214 workers with...

Bronchial hyperactivity is a recognized hallmark of asthma, characterized by an exaggerated bronchial response to numerous mediators, including histamine. It is also well recognized that bronchial hyperresponsiveness is increased following allergen exposure, although no particular mediator has been shown to induce this response. The recent observation that PAF can induce increased nonspecific b...

Asthma is a chronic disease characterized by increased airway responsiveness and airway inflammation. The functional role of nitric oxide (NO) and the various nitric oxide synthase (NOS) isoforms in human asthma is controversial. To investigate the role of NO in an established model of allergic asthma, mice with targeted deletions of the three known isoforms of NOS (NOS1, 2, and 3) were studied...

Ithough asthma is a disease that has been described for centuries, attempts at definition and criteria for diagnosis have only occurred within the last several decades. ‘There is, however, still not a universally agreed upon definition. A definition of asthma recently proposed by the expert panel on the management of asthma would probably be acceptable to most:’ “Asthma is a lung disease with t...

Interaction between airway edema and lung inflation on responsiveness of individual airways in vivo. J. Appl. Physiol. 83(2): 366-370, 1997.-Inflammatory changes and airway wall thickening are suggested to cause increased airway responsiveness in patients with asthma. In five sheep, the dose-response relationships of individual airways were measured at different lung volumes to methacholine (MC...