In population studies, the provocative dose (PD) of bronchoconstrictor causing a significant decrement in lung function cannot be calculated for most subjects. Dose-response curves for carbachol were examined to determine whether this relationship can be summarized by means of a continuous index likely to be calculable for all subjects, namely the two-point dose response slope (DRS) of mean res...

cromolyn sodium, a mast cell stabilizing agent, provides an immediate protective effect against the exercise-induced bronchoconstriction while being used before the exercise. however, cromolyn is ineffective in reversing asthmatic bronchospasm; it is used as a maintenance therapy and has a prophylactic role in chronic asthma.    the purpose of this study was to determine the extent of change in...

increases in body mass index (bmi) are reported to influence asthma response to treatment. the aim of this study was to investigate the relationship between bmi and response to treatment in a group of patients that were referred for asthma control. effectiveness measurements in this analysis included percentage of changes in forced volume in 1 second (fev1), forced volume capacity (fvc), fev1/f...

Background: Various variance reduction techniques such as forced detection (FD) have been implemented in Monte Carlo (MC) simulation of nuclear medicine in an effort to decrease the simulation time while keeping accuracy. However most of these techniques still result in very long MC simulation times for being implemented into routine use. Materials and Methods: Convolution-based force...

BACKGROUND Use of short-acting β(2)-agonists in chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) during treatment with long-acting β(2)-agonists is recommended as needed, but its effectiveness is unclear. The purpose of this study was to assess the additional bronchodilating effect of increasing doses of salbutamol during acute and chronic treatment with formoterol in patients with COPD. METHODS ...

BACKGROUND Spirometry as a non-invasive and inexpensive test is widely used for occupational health evaluations. Bronchodilator test is used for the assessment of airflow limitation and increase in forced expiratory volume in 1 second (FEV1) or forced vital capacity (FVC) is considered as a positive response. This study was performed to assess the response of forced expiratory volume in 6 secon...