Clinical Utility of Echocardiography for the Diagnosis and Prognosis in Children with Bronchopulmonary Dsyplasia.

Background: Bronchopulmonary dysplasia (BPD) may result in chronic pulmonary artery hypertension and right ventricular (RV) dysfunction. Various echocardiographic assessments of RV dysfunction have been used to determine whether echocardiographic measurements of premature infants with BPD could provide sensitive measures of RV function that correlates with BPD severity.

Methods: Twenty-eight control subjects without BPD (non BPD group), 28 patients with mild BPD, 11 patients with moderate BPD, and six patients with severe BPD underwent echocardiograms with standard measurement such as ejection fraction by M-mode, tricuspid regurgitation pressure gradient, myocardial performance index (MPI) derived from pulse Doppler, and tissue Doppler imaging (TDI) measurements.

Airways are more reactive to histamine than to methacholine in patients with mild airway hyperresponsiveness, regardless of atopy.

Background: The airway muscles from allergen-sensitized animals in vitro show a heightened response to histamine, but not to carbachol. This study investigated whether the airway responsiveness to histamine in vivo is comparable to that of methacholine in human subjects with varying degrees of atopy.

Methods: One-hundred-and-sixty-eight consecutive adult asthma patients or volunteers underwent bronchoprovocation tests to both histamine and methacholine after determining their blood eosinophil counts, serum total IgE levels and skin test reactivity to 10 common aeroallergens.