Gain without Pain?

Exercise is not always enthusiastically pursued by your Editors, whose idea of a strenuous work out is serial elbow flexion with a large glass of wine (or Bollinger club Champagne for IDP) in the ipsilateral hand. The relationship between exercise and asthma has hitherto been not dissimilar to that between Greece and Angela Merkel – we all know exercise triggers asthma, and has been proposed to be causative, if carried out in polluted air or you are an elite Nordic skier. However, in this issue of Thorax, we publish a randomised controlled trial showing that asthmatic patients assigned to aerobic training got fitter, and reduced bronchial responsiveness and systemic inflammation, albeit with no effect on markers of airway eosinophilia (see page 732, Editors' choice). So in addition to being Editors' Choice, they get the Jeremy Hunt prize for the cheapest asthma treatment on the market. For the dedicatedly inert, LUTE and VERSE may be an alternative. Not Oscar Wilde being aesthetic, but two trials of the anti-IL13 monoclonal Lebrikizumab, which showed that periostin positive adult asthmatics randomised to active treatment had fewer asthma attacks and improved lung …