Edited by Elizabeth Sapey .
270 pages .
Open Access .
Asthma is a common, chronic and potentially debilitating disease. It is diagnosed currently on clinical grounds with a combination of symptoms (intermittent breathlessness, wheeze and cough) associated with variable airflow obstruction, which is classically reversible (by bronchodilation).
The heterogeneity of asthma clinically is likely to be due to differences in the cause and the inflammatory signal present in individual groups of patients. Predisposing environmental factors (where known) vary between individuals and across countries, depending on antigenic load. However, not all patients with asthma demonstrate atopy or allergy, and other immune responses are thought important in some patient groups.
It is becoming more recognised that there are specific patient phenotypes in asthma that are associated with differing patterns of disease progression, varying responses to treatment and these are likely to be driven by different genetic susceptibility factors leading to specific inflammatory outputs. Our current understanding of such factors is limited.
This book focuses on emerging theories of the immunological drivers of asthma, how these relate to different patient phenotypes, and how these can be utilised to diagnose asthma more accurately and treat asthma more effectively.
The editors would like to thank the authors for their contributions and we very much hope this book increases the interest in asthma research.
Dr Elizabeth Sapey
Centre for Translational Inflammation Research
University of Birmingham
United Kingdom
No comments:
Post a Comment