Studies of airway inflammation in asthma and chronic airflow limitation. Do they help to explain causes?

Although progress seems slow, it is urgent to find ways to prevent asthma in children and CAL in smokers. Understanding the mechanisms of disease is usually important to preventing them. In airway disease there remain many opportunities to make progress in understanding causes by studying the nature of the pathological changes present. In particular, the use of immunocytochemistry and DNA probing to define the specific abnormalities present in the inflammatory cells and the relation of those changes to the clinical manifestations and pathogenetic mechanisms should be productive.