Introduction to alveolar liquid clearance during lung injury: a crucial function--long ignored.

摘要

Two reviews in this issue of Intensive Care Medicine present an updated vision of the role of alveolar liquid clearance- during acute lung injury [1, 2]. It is now well established that the epithelium that lines airways and alveoli is responsible for most if not all of the removal of excess liquid from the airspaces. The importance of the alveolar epithelium has long been ignored. Its very existence as a continuous layer was even denied for a long time because of the limitations of light microscopy, which did not allow the visualisation of thin type I cells.