Background: Pulmonary fibrosis is a severe, progressive form of interstitial lung disease associated with increased morbidity and mortality. Pulmonary hypertension often accompanies severe pulmonary fibrosis and is also associated with worse outcomes. Antifibrotic therapy and pulmonary vasodilator therapy have demonstrated clinical benefits in pulmonary fibrosis and pulmonary hypertension, respectively.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSummary● This is a plain language summary of two articles originally published in and . These articles presented the results of GALATHEA and TERRANOVA, two clinical studies that took place across 41 countries. ○ GALATHEA and TERRANOVA measured how patients' COPD changed from before their first (10, 30, or 100 mg) injection, to after 56 weeks of treatment.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFChronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) is a heterogeneous condition of the lungs, characterized by chronic respiratory symptoms, primarily dyspnea, cough, and sputum production, due to airway and/or alveoli abnormalities that cause persistent, and often progressive, airflow obstruction. Although the underlying mechanisms responsible for COPD remain poorly understood, over the last several decades, clinical phenotypes and endotypes have been suggested. These include frequent exacerbator and eosinophilic groups that guide tailored therapies for patients with that clinical expression.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Pulmonary hypertension (PH) confers increased mortality in patients with chronic lung disease, yet there remains a lack of validated risk assessment tools to prognosticate these patients. We aimed to create a risk assessment tool to stratify patients with chronic lung disease and PH by risk of one-year mortality from time of PH diagnosis.
Methods: This was a retrospective cohort study of patients with chronic lung disease and PH.
Homeostatic imbalance and lung function decline are central physiological characteristics of aging and susceptibility to respiratory diseases. Senescence contributes to tissue damage and alveolar epithelial cell injury and decreases reparative capacity. Alveolar type II (ATII) cells have stem cell potential and self-renew to regenerate the alveoli after damage.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF) are debilitating diseases associated with divergent histopathological changes in the lungs. At present, due to cost and technical limitations, profiling cell types is not practical in large epidemiology cohorts (n > 1000). Here, we used computational deconvolution to identify cell types in COPD and IPF lungs whose abundances and cell type-specific gene expression are associated with disease diagnosis and severity.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSemin Thorac Cardiovasc Surg
December 2024
The Clinical Practice Standards Committee of the American Association for Thoracic Surgery assembled an expert panel and conducted a systematic review of the literature detailing studies directly comparing treatment options for high-risk patients with stage I non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC). A systematic search was performed to identify publications comparing outcomes following image-guided thermal ablation (IGTA), stereotactic ablative radiotherapy (SABR; also called stereotactic body radiation therapy [SBRT] and stereotactic radiosurgery [SRS]), and sublobar resection-the main treatment options applicable to high-risk patients with stage I NSCLC. There were no publications detailing completed randomized controlled trials comparing these treatment options.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFStereotactic ablative radiotherapy (SABR) has emerged as an alternative, non-surgical treatment for high-risk patients with stage I non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) with increased use over time. The American Association for Thoracic Surgery (AATS) Clinical Practice Standards Committee (CPSC) assembled an expert panel and conducted a systematic review of the literature evaluating the results of SABR, which is also referred to as stereotactic body radiation therapy (SBRT) or stereotactic radiosurgery (SRS), prior to developing treatment recommendations for high-risk patients with stage I NSCLC based on expert consensus. Publications detailing the findings of 16 prospective studies of SABR and 14 retrospective studies of SABR for the management of early-stage lung cancer in 54,697 patients were identified by systematic review of the literature with further review by members of our expert panel.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSublobar resection offers a parenchymal-sparing surgical alternative to lobectomy and includes wedge resection and segmentectomy. Sublobar resection has been historically utilized in high-risk patients with compromised lung function; however, the technique is becoming more prevalent for normal-risk patients with peripheral stage IA non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) <2 cm. In this article, we summarize the technique of sublobar resection, the importance of surgical margins and lymph node sampling, patient selection, perioperative complications, outcomes, and the impact of sublobar resection on the quality of life.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFA significant proportion of patients with stage I non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) are considered at high risk for complications or mortality after lobectomy. The American Association for Thoracic Surgery (AATS) previously published an expert consensus document detailing important considerations in determining who is at high risk. The current objective was to evaluate treatment options and important factors to consider during treatment selection for these high-risk patients.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFImage-guided thermal ablation (IGTA) applied to pulmonary pathology is an alternative to surgery in high-risk patients with stage I non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC). Its application to lung neoplasm was first introduced in 2001 and has been implemented to treat metastatic disease to the lung or in select medically inoperable patients with peripheral stage I NSCLC. IGTA may also be an alternative to treat stage I NSCLC in non-operable patients with interstitial lung disease in whom a radiation modality is deemed too high risk.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe Global Initiative for Chronic Obstructive Lung Disease (GOLD) report states that the diagnosis of COPD should be considered in individuals with chronic respiratory symptoms and/or exposure to risk factors. Forced spirometry demonstrating airflow obstruction after bronchodilation is required to confirm the diagnosis using a threshold of forced expiratory volume in 1 s (FEV)/forced vital capacity (FVC) ratio <0.7.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAmong tobacco-exposed persons with preserved spirometry (TEPS), we previously demonstrated that different lung volume indices, specifically elevated total lung capacity (TLC) versus elevated ratio of functional residual capacity-to-TLC (FRC/TLC), identify different lung disease characteristics in the COPDGene cohort. Determine differential disease characteristics and trajectories associated with the lung volume indices among TEPS in the SPIROMICS cohort. We categorized TEPS (n=814) by tertiles (low, intermediate, high) of TLC or residual volume-to-TLC (RV/TLC) derived from baseline CT images, and then examined clinical and spirometric disease trajectories in mutually exclusive categories of participants with high TLC without high RV/TLC ([TLC]) versus high RV/TLC without high TLC ([RV/TLC]).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAm J Respir Crit Care Med
February 2025
Am J Respir Cell Mol Biol
September 2024
Impaired alveolar epithelial regeneration in patients with idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF) and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) is attributed to telomere dysfunction in type II alveolar epithelial cells (ACs). Genetic susceptibility, aging, and toxicant exposures, including tobacco smoke (TS), contribute to telomere dysfunction in ACs. Here we investigated whether improvement of telomere function plays a role in CSP7-mediated protection of ACs against ongoing senescence and apoptosis during bleomycin (BLM)-induced pulmonary fibrosis (PF) as well as alveolar injury caused by chronic TS exposure.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFNon-invasive ventilation (NIV) is the mainstay to treat patients who need augmentation of ventilation for acute and chronic forms of respiratory failure. The last several decades have witnessed an extension of the indications for NIV to a variety of acute and chronic lung diseases. Evolving advancements in technology and personalised approaches to patient care make it feasible to prioritise patient-centred care models that deliver home-based management using telemonitoring and telemedicine systems support.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Although COVID-19 is no longer a declared global health emergency, data remain limited on the impact of COVID-19 in lung transplant recipients.
Methods: We identified lung transplant recipients who were diagnosed with COVID-19 from March 2020 through August 2022 in our institutional database and investigated clinical outcomes. We then analyzed outcomes based on date of COVID-19 diagnosis (first wave March 2020-October 2020; second wave November 2020-2021; third wave December 2021-September 2022) and compared these results.