[Bronchial asthma. New ideas on pathogenicity and treatment]

New insights on the pathogenicity of asthma have derived the attention to the inflammatory changes observed in the airways of asthmatic patients. The cellular and biochemical mechanisms that take place in them are not well enough understood and, thus, new questions have been added to the ones that existed before the asthma was considered an inflammatory disease. The interactions between cells and inflammation mediators, and between both of them and the autonomous control of the bronchial tree, are still adding new questions and preventing the working-out of a comprehensive theory explaining all the changes observed in asthma. In addition, the recent insights on the relationship between asthma, athopy and hereditary conditionings of both, have significantly increased our body of knowledge on the disease and have open new perspectives that now can be only foreseen. The new concepts related to the pathogenicity of asthma have placed the anti-inflammatory therapy in the first line of the anti-asthmatic therapy. The development of new agonists of the platelet activation factor, leukotriens or tromboxanes and the therapeutical strategies based on the control of IgE hypersecretion, may be relevant advances for the future control of this disease.