COPD is a highly debilitating disease that represents a substantial and growing health burden in women. There is increasing evidence for sex-related differences in COPD risk, progression, and outcomes. However, the disease receives scant attention as a women's health issue. Thus, a multifaceted approach is required to address COPD in women, including greater awareness, minimization of risk, and further elucidation of the sex-specific factors (biological and cultural) that affect risk, disease progression, and treatment success. This article reviews the current literature on the topic and provides suggestions for achieving better outcomes for the millions of women with COPD worldwide.

The treatment of chronic hypersensitivity pneumonitis (cHP) often includes systemic oral corticosteroids, but the optimal pharmacologic management remains unclear. The morbidity associated with prednisone has motivated the search for alternative therapies. We aimed to determine the effect of treatment with mycophenolate mofetil (MMF) or azathioprine (AZA) on lung function in patients with cHP.

Lung cancer screening is a complex balance of benefits and harms. A counseling and shared decision-making visit has been mandated to assist patients with the decision about participation in screening. To our knowledge, the impact of this visit on patient understanding and decisions has not been studied.

The benefits of a diagnostic workup for occult cancer in patients with VTE are controversial. Our aim was to provide and validate a risk score for occult cancer in patients with VTE.

The importance of balance between controller and reliever medications in asthma is recognized. However, to our knowledge, the extent to which real-world practice has caught up with evidence-based guidelines has not been studied.

Right atrial pressure (Pra) is determined by the interaction of the function of the heart as a pump, which is called cardiac function, and the factors that determine the return of blood to the heart, which is called return function. Thus, monitoring Pra or its surrogate, central venous pressure (CVP), can give important insights into mechanisms behind changes in hemodynamic status, responses to interventions, and the likelihood of diagnoses. Examination of the components of the Pra tracing, especially during the ventilator cycle, can also give information about right-sided cardiac diastolic function, the status of the tricuspid valve, volume responsiveness, and the cardiac rhythm. Importantly, the pressure difference from the large venous reservoir to the heart is small, and thus great care must be taken with technical factors that affect the measurement.

The synthetic peptide solnatide is a novel pharmacologic agent that reduces extravascular lung water, blunts reactive oxygen species production, and improves lung function due to its ability to directly activate the epithelial sodium channel. The goal of this study was to investigate the effect of solnatide in pulmonary edema induced by acute hypobaric hypoxia and exercise in rats, which is considered a model for high-altitude pulmonary edema.

Stage classification provides a nomenclature about the anatomic extent of a cancer; a consistent language provides the ability to communicate about a specific patient and about cohorts of patients in clinical studies. This paper summarizes the eighth edition of lung cancer stage classification, which is the worldwide standard as of January 1, 2017. This revision is based on a large global database, a sophisticated analysis, extensive internal validation as well as multiple assessments confirming generalizability. Practicing clinicians must be familiar with the stage classification system when managing contemporary patients with lung cancer.

Asthma is a complex disease well-suited to metabolomic profiling, both for the development of novel biomarkers and for the improved understanding of pathophysiology. In this review, we summarize the 21 existing metabolomic studies of asthma in humans, all of which reported significant findings and concluded that individual metabolites and metabolomic profiles measured in exhaled breath condensate, urine, plasma, and serum could identify people with asthma and asthma phenotypes with high discriminatory ability. There was considerable consistency across the studies in terms of the reported biomarkers, regardless of biospecimen, profiling technology, and population age. In particular, acetate, adenosine, alanine, hippurate, succinate, threonine, and trans-aconitate, and pathways relating to hypoxia response, oxidative stress, immunity, inflammation, lipid metabolism and the tricarboxylic acid cycle were all identified as significant in at least two studies. There were also a number of nonreplicated results; however, the literature is not yet sufficiently developed to determine whether these represent spurious findings or reflect the substantial heterogeneity and limited statistical power in the studies and their methods to date. This review highlights the need for additional asthma metabolomic studies to explore these issues, and, further, the need for standardized methods in the way these studies are conducted. We conclude by discussing the potential of translation of these metabolomic findings into clinically useful biomarkers and the crucial role that integrated omics is likely to play in this endeavor.

Clinicians have traditionally dichotomized bacteria as friendly commensals or harmful pathogens. However, the line separating the two has become blurred with the recognition that the intestinal microbiome is a complex entity in which species can shift sides-from friend to foe and back again-based on crucial factors in their local environment. Significant disruptions in the homeostasis of the microbiome, a phenomenon called dysbiosis, is increasingly associated with a host of untoward effects. Patients in the ICU are at high risk for dysbiosis given the high rate of antibiotic use, acute changes in diet, and the stress of critical illness. Probiotics are living microbes of human origin that when ingested in sufficient quantities, can colonize sites such as the oropharynx and GI tract and provide benefits to the host. In recent years, we have increasingly explored the utility of using probiotics to reverse the intestinal dysbiosis associated with critical illness, thereby reducing select ICU complications associated with increased morbidity and mortality. Although these preliminary efforts have demonstrated varying degrees of success, our present studies suffer from a host of limitations that hinder the strength of their conclusions and the generalizability of their results. Probiotic investigations have been further hobbled by current regulatory requirements, which were designed to serve as the framework for pharmaceutical research. Although such measures are intended to ensure patient safety, they inadvertently impose barriers that stifle innovation regarding nutraceuticals. This review strives to summarize the current evidence regarding the efficacy and safety of probiotics in the ICU as well as to provide an overview of the obstacles probiotic researchers face going forward.

Harnessing the immune system to fight cancer is an exciting advancement in lung cancer therapy. Antitumor immunity can be augmented by checkpoint blockade therapy, which removes the inhibition/brakes imposed on the immune system by the tumor. Checkpoint blockade therapy with anti-programmed cell death protein 1 (anti-PD-1)/anti-programmed death ligand 1 (anti-PDL-1) antibodies causes tumor regression in about 25% of patients with lung cancer. In another approach, the immune system is forced or accelerated to attack the tumor through augmentation of the antitumor response against mutations carried by each lung tumor. This latter approach has become feasible since the advent of next-generation sequencing technology, which allows identification of the specific mutations that each individual lung tumor bears. Indeed lung cancers are now known to have high mutation rates, making them logical targets for mutation-directed immune therapies. We review how sequencing of lung cancer mutations leads to better understanding of how the immune system recognizes tumors, providing improved opportunities to track antitumor immunity and ultimately leading to the development of personalized vaccine strategies aimed at unleashing the host immune system to attack mutations in the tumor.

Endobronchial ultrasonographically guided transbronchial needle aspiration (EBUS-TBNA) of thoracic structures is a commonly performed tissue sampling technique. The use of an inner-stylet in the EBUS needle has never been rigorously evaluated and may be unnecessary.