Chair's Summary: Mechanisms of Relevance to Clinical Heterogeneity of Asthma and Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease

摘要

Systematic analysis of large groups of patients with asthma shows that the clinical features of asthma can be grouped into clusters that vary by traits such as sex, body weight, degree of airflow obstruction, symptoms, skin test responses to aeroallergens, and health care use. Knowledge that clinical traits cluster in this way into distinct patient subgroups has prompted investigators to consider whether distinct pathobiological mechanisms underlie specific clinical phenotypes.