American journal of respiratory and critical care medicine
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Am. J. Respir. Crit. Care Med. · Dec 2014
Cigarette Smoking Impairs Human Pulmonary Immunity to Mycobacterium tuberculosis.
Cigarette smoking is linked to important aspects of tuberculosis, such as susceptibility to infection, disease reactivation, mortality, transmission, and persistent infectiousness. The mechanistic basis for this remains poorly understood. ⋯ In smokers, the pulmonary compartment has a number of macrophage-specific immune impairments that provide some mechanistic explanations whereby cigarette smoking renders a patient susceptible to tuberculosis infection and disease.
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Am. J. Respir. Crit. Care Med. · Dec 2014
Gene Expression in Relation to Exhaled NO Identifies Novel Asthma Phenotypes with Unique Biomolecular Pathways.
Although asthma is recognized as a heterogeneous disease associated with clinical phenotypes, the molecular basis of these phenotypes remains poorly understood. Although genomic studies have successfully broadened our understanding in diseases such as cancer, they have not been widely used in asthma studies. ⋯ These findings show that bronchial epithelial cell gene expression, as related to the asthma biomarker FeNO, can identify distinct asthma phenotypes, while also suggesting the presence of underlying novel gene pathways relevant to these phenotypes.