Management of asthma during the Coronavirus disease 2019 outbreak.
Published in Respiratory medicine and research
Cortistatin protects against inflammatory airway diseases through curbing CCL2 and antagonizing NF-κB signaling pathway....
Published in Biochemical and biophysical research communications
Asthma is a chronic inflammatory disease affecting millions of people around the world, yet much remains unknown about its underlying mechanisms. Cortistatin (CST) is a neuropeptide which is reported to be a potential endogenous anti-inflammatory factor in several conditions. To testify the potential involvement of CST in airway inflammatory reacti...
Interleukin 4 gene polymorphism (−589C/T) and the risk of asthma: a meta-analysis and met-regression based on 55 studies...
...Published in BMC Immunology
Background Numerous investigations have previously evaluated the association of interleukin (IL) 4 gene polymorphisms and the risk of asthma, conferring inconsistent results. To resolve the incongruent outcomes yielded from different single studies, we conducted the most up-to-date meta-analysis of IL4 gene −589C/T (rs2243250) polymorphism and susc...
Exploration of the sputum methylome and omics deconvolution by quadratic programming in molecular profiling of asthma an...
...Published in Respiratory Research
Background To date, most studies involving high-throughput analyses of sputum in asthma and COPD have focused on identifying transcriptomic signatures of disease. No whole-genome methylation analysis of sputum cells has been performed yet. In this context, the highly variable cellular composition of sputum has potential to confound the molecular an...
Comparative efficacy of glucocorticoid receptor agonists on Th2 cell function and attenuation by progesterone
Published in BMC Immunology
Background Corticosteroids (CS)s suppress cytokine production and induce apoptosis of inflammatory cells. Prednisone and dexamethasone are oral CSs prescribed for treating asthma exacerbations. While prednisone is more commonly prescribed, dexamethasone is long acting and a more potent glucocorticoid receptor (GR) agonist. It can be administered as...
Association between factors related to the pregnancy, neonatal period, and later complications (especially asthma) and m...
Published in BMC Women's Health
BackgroundStudies about the majority of the factors that may potentially influence the pubertal timing and menarche were controversial. The objective was to evaluate the association between factors related to the pregnancy, neonatal period, and the complications that may happen later in life and the menarcheal age in a sample of Lebanese girls admi...
The use of a direct bronchial challenge test in primary care to diagnose asthma
Published in npj Primary Care Respiratory Medicine
Many asthmatics in primary care have mild symptoms and lack airflow obstruction. If variable expiratory airflow limitation cannot be determined by spirometry or peak expiratory flow, despite a history of respiratory symptoms, a positive bronchial challenge test (BCT) can confirm the diagnosis of asthma. However, BCT is traditionally performed in se...
Impact of pulmonary rehabilitation on patients’ health care needs and asthma control: a quasi-experimental study
Published in BMC Pulmonary Medicine
BackgroundPulmonary rehabilitation offers potential benefits to people with asthma. It is however unknown if rehabilitation favourably affects patients’ health care needs. We therefore examined if rehabilitation reduced needs and, in addition, if it improved asthma control.MethodsOne hundred fifty patients with asthma were surveyed in three rehabil...
Unmet need in severe, uncontrolled asthma: can anti-TSLP therapy with tezepelumab provide a valuable new treatment optio...
Published in Respiratory Research
Despite treatment with standard-of-care medications, including currently available biologic therapies, many patients with severe asthma have uncontrolled disease, which is associated with a high risk of hospitalization and high healthcare costs. Biologic therapies approved for severe asthma have indications limited to patients with either eosinophi...
Latent-space embedding of expression data identifies gene signatures from sputum samples of asthmatic patients
Published in BMC Bioinformatics
BackgroundThe pathogenesis of asthma is a complex process involving multiple genes and pathways. Identifying biomarkers from asthma datasets, especially those that include heterogeneous subpopulations, is challenging. Potentially, autoencoders provide ideal frameworks for such tasks as they can embed complex, noisy high-dimensional gene expression ...
