Asthma heterogeneity and severity

Abstract

Asthma is a common, chronic inflammatory airways disease characterized by a clinical syndrome of bronchial hyperresponsiveness, inflammation, and reversible airflow obstruction. Individuals with asthma can vary widely in clinical presentation, severity, and pathobiology. The incident factors, pathogenesis, prognosis, and treatment of asthma remain incompletely understood. Utilizing measurable characteristics of asthmatic patients, including demographic, physiologic, and biologic markers, can however identify meaningful phenotypic categories in asthma. Identification of these phenotypes may help improve precision therapeutics targeted toward an individual’s’ disease, and may identify strategies for preventing progression of disease severity.

Answer to: “Biomarkers in allergic asthma: Which matrix should we use?”

“…Definitely, asthma is a very complex disease which presents heterogeneous clinical symptoms and multiple causes. Presenting diverse subphenotypes, to date there is not enough information to characterize them in the clinical setting . In this sense, we agree with the authors that as much information as possible from different types of samples will provide a better global picture of the molecular mechanism underlying this pathology.…”

Baseline serum CXCL10 and IL-12 levels may predict severe asthmatics' responsiveness to omalizumab

“…Asthma is a common respiratory disease that is perceived as a heterogeneous clinical syndrome of airway hyperresponsiveness, airway inflammation and airflow obstruction, with various genetic and environmental backgrounds and exacerbating factors, and varying responsiveness to therapeutic agents [1]. About 5-10% of asthma patients are estimated to be severe persistent asthmatics [2,3].…”

Latent-space embedding of expression data identifies gene signatures from sputum samples of asthmatic patients

“…Research suggests that asthma is a heterogeneous disease, as its pathogenicity may largely depend on a patient's individual genetic variability [18]. For several previously-proposed subsetting methods of the asthma population, many of the sub-populations contains non-trivial proportion of severe cases [7].…”