EDITORIAL
Asthma
Non-eosinophilic asthma and the innate immune response
Correspondence to:
Correspondence to:
Professor I D Pavord
Department of Respiratory Medicine, Allergy and Thoracic Surgery, University Hospitals of Leicester NHS Trust, Glenfield Hospital, Leicester LE3 9QP, UK; ian.pavord@uhl-tr.nhs.uk
Pathological heterogeneity of asthma
| The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below. |
The concept that there may be heterogeneity of the underlying pathology of asthma has a long pedigree: 80 years ago, Rackemann1 suggested that a subgroup of patients with intrinsic asthma had disease driven by bacterial infection of the upper and lower respiratory tract and the authors of an early postmortem study2 were struck by the heterogeneity of lower airway inflammatory response in fatal asthma. However, since then the prevailing view, largely driven by bronchial biopsy studies of limited numbers of patients with relatively mild disease, has been that there are more similarities than differences in the pathology of subtypes of asthma. Thus, asthma is currently viewed as a condition characterised by TH2 cytokine-mediated eosinophilic airway mucosal inflammation.3,4
The development of simple methods to assess airway inflammation non-invasively using induced sputum which are applicable to a wide variety of patients5 has renewed interest in investigation of the pathological heterogeneity of
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