Annals of the American Thoracic Society
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Multicenter Study
A genome-wide association study of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease in Hispanics.
Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) have identified disease-susceptibility loci, mostly in subjects of European descent. ⋯ We have identified two novel loci (in or near the genes KLHL7/NUPL2 and DLG2) that may play a role in COPD pathogenesis in Hispanic populations.
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Acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) was first described in 1967, and since then there have been a large number of studies addressing its pathogenesis and therapies. Despite intense research efforts, very few therapies for ARDS have been shown to be effective other than the use of lung protection strategies. The scarcity of therapeutic choices is related to the intricate pathogenesis of the syndrome and to insensitive and aspecific criteria to diagnose this profound acute respiratory failure. The aim of this paper is to summarize advances of new ARDS definitions and provide an overview of new relevant signaling pathways that mediate acute lung injury.
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Tissue fibrosis, a major cause of death worldwide, leads to significant organ dysfunction in any organ of the human body. In the lung, fibrosis critically impairs gas exchange, tissue oxygenation, and immune function. Idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF) is the most detrimental and lethal fibrotic disease of the lung, with an estimated median survival of 50% after 3-5 years. ⋯ CLAD affects up to 50% of all transplanted lungs after 5 years, and is characterized by small airway obstruction with pronounced epithelial injury, aberrant wound healing, and subepithelial and interstitial fibrosis. Intriguingly, the mechanisms leading to the fibrotic processes in the engrafted lung exhibit striking similarities to those in IPF; therefore, antifibrotic therapies may contribute to increased graft function and survival in CLAD. In this review, we focus on these common fibrosis-related mechanisms in IPF and CLAD, comparing and contrasting clinical phenotypes, the mechanisms of fibrogenesis, and biomarkers to monitor, predict, or prognosticate disease status.
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Randomized Controlled Trial Multicenter Study
Hospital patterns of mechanical ventilation for patients with exacerbations of COPD.
Randomized trials have shown that noninvasive ventilation (NIV) can reduce the need for intubation and improve the survival of patients with severe exacerbations of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD); however, it is not known whether hospitals with greater use of NIV achieve lower rates of intubation and better patient outcomes. ⋯ Use of NIV as the initial ventilation strategy for patients with COPD varies considerably across hospitals. Institutions with greater use of NIV have lower rates of invasive mechanical ventilation and better patient outcomes.
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Randomized Controlled Trial Multicenter Study
Identification of five chronic obstructive pulmonary disease subgroups with different prognoses in the ECLIPSE cohort using cluster analysis.
Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) is a heterogeneous disease that likely includes clinically relevant subgroups. ⋯ Cluster analysis using baseline data in ECLIPSE identified five COPD subgroups that differ in outcomes and inflammatory biomarkers and show different relationships between clinical parameters, suggesting the clusters represent clinically and biologically different subtypes of COPD.