Thorax
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Comparative Study
The development and validation of the King's Sarcoidosis Questionnaire for the assessment of health status.
Health status is impaired in patients with sarcoidosis. There is a paucity of tools that assess health status in sarcoidosis. The objective of this study was to develop and validate the King's Sarcoidosis Questionnaire (KSQ), a new modular health status measure. ⋯ The KSQ is a brief, valid, self-completed health status measure for sarcoidosis. It can be used in the clinic to assess sarcoidosis from the patients' perspective.
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Randomized Controlled Trial Multicenter Study
Continuous positive airway pressure improves sleepiness but not calculated vascular risk in patients with minimally symptomatic obstructive sleep apnoea: the MOSAIC randomised controlled trial.
Continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP) for symptomatic obstructive sleep apnoea (OSA) improves sleepiness and reduces vascular risk, but such treatment for the more prevalent, minimally symptomatic disease is contentious. ⋯ In patients with minimally symptomatic OSA, CPAP can reduce subjective and objective daytime sleepiness, and improve self-assessed health status, but does not appear to improve calculated vascular risk.
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Eosinophilic inflammation is implicated in asthma. Eotaxin 1-3 regulate eosinophil trafficking into the airways along with other chemotactic factors. However, the epithelial and bronchoalveolar lavage (BAL) cell expression of these chemokines in relation to asthma severity and eosinophilic phenotypes has not been addressed. ⋯ Epithelial eotaxin-2 and 3 are increased in asthma and severe asthma. Their expression may contribute to luminal migration of eosinophils, especially in later onset disease, asthma control and severity.
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Systemic blockade of tissue factor (TF) attenuates acute lung injury (ALI) in animal models of sepsis but the effects of global TF deficiency are unknown. We used mice with complete knockout of mouse TF and low levels (∼1%) of human TF (LTF mice) to test the hypothesis that global TF deficiency attenuates lung inflammation in direct lung injury. ⋯ These findings indicate that global TF deficiency does not confer protection in a direct lung injury model. Rather, TF deficiency causes increased intra-alveolar haemorrhage following LPS leading to increased lipid peroxidation. Strategies to globally inhibit TF may be deleterious in patients with ALI.