Exploring 'clinical conundrum' of asthma-COPD overlap in nonsmokers with chronic asthma
2015-08-05
(Press-News.org) Glenview, Ill. (August 5, 2015)-- Researchers may be closer to finding the mechanism responsible for loss of lung elastic recoil and airflow limitation in nonsmokers with chronic asthma. The study published today in the journal CHEST Unraveling the Pathophysiology of the Asthma-COPD Overlap Syndrome reported that both nonsmokers and smokers with chronic asthma share features of COPD. This conundrum, often referred to as asthma-COPD overlap syndrome (ACOS), has been assumed to be due to large and especially small airway remodeling.
The study found that many patients with asthma are at risk for COPD due to a proinflammatory and proteolytic cascade. This may lead to lung tissue breakdown and unsuspected diffuse, mild centrilobular emphysema that is not easily detected clinically.
While these characteristics of airflow obstruction are common in smokers, the mechanisms responsible for lung elastic recoil and persistent expiratory airflow limitation in nonsmokers remains unknown. Current knowledge about ACOS lack structure-function studies, which researchers believe may help to better unravel the mechanisms of ACOS.
INFORMATION:
American College of Chest Physicians (CHEST), publisher of the journal CHEST, is the global leader in advancing best patient outcomes through innovative chest medicine education, clinical research, and team-based care. Its mission is to champion the prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of chest diseases through education, communication, and research. It serves as an essential connection to clinical knowledge and resources for its 18,700 members from around the world who provide patient care in pulmonary, critical care, and sleep medicine. For more information about CHEST, visit chestnet.org.
ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:
2015-08-05
PITTSBURGH, Aug. 5, 2015 - Researchers at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine have figured out how to objectively quantify the beating action of cilia, the tiny, hair-like projections on cells that line nasal passages, the lungs and almost every other body tissue, according to a study published online today in Science Translational Medicine. Such digital signatures could help doctors more quickly and accurately diagnose ciliary motion (CM) defects, which can cause severe respiratory airway clearance defects and also developmental defects including congenital ...
2015-08-05
ROSEMONT, Ill.-- Most patients younger than age 50 with a torn or severely damaged meniscus experienced reduced pain and improved knee function following transplant surgery, according to a study in the August 5 issue of the Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery (JBJS). However, many patients required additional surgery within 10 years.
The meniscus is a wedge-shaped piece of fibrocartilage in the knee that acts as a shock absorber between the thighbone and shinbone. A meniscus can be torn during sports or wear away over time as the body ages. For younger patients with knee ...
2015-08-05
Using photosynthetically active microorganisms, researchers at the Ruhr-Universität Bochum (RUB) have succeeded in manufacturing several biocatalysts suitable for industrial application: a crucial step towards sustainable chemical processes, according to Dr Marc Nowaczyk from the Chair for Plant Biochemistry and Jun.-Prof Dr Robert Kourist, Junior Research Group Microbial Biochemistry.
Sustainable manufacture of enzymes for the industry
Seeing as our planet's fossil resources are limited, researchers are looking for new methods for the production of certain substances, ...
2015-08-05
If you want to form very flexible chains of nanoparticles in liquid in order to build tiny robots with flexible joints or make magnetically self-healing gels, you need to revert to childhood and think about sandcastles.
In a paper published this week in Nature Materials, researchers from North Carolina State University and the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill show that magnetic nanoparticles encased in oily liquid shells can bind together in water, much like sand particles mixed with the right amount of water can form sandcastles.
"Because oil and water don't ...
2015-08-05
Disney Research has developed a new method of rendering high-quality graphics for animated features that efficiently corrects for erroneous pixels while preserving the crisp detail in images, significantly increasing the efficiency of producing animated images.
The new approach enhances the performance of Monte Carlo ray tracing, a method for rendering 3-D scenes by randomly tracing the possible light paths for each pixel in an image. The images produced by ray tracing can be highly realistic, but can require large amounts of computer time to render.
The Disney researchers ...
2015-08-05
The elaborate costumes worn by Rapunzel, the heroine of Disney's "Tangled," are testament to the growing sophistication of cloth animation, but for art directors, who must tweak tens or hundreds of technical parameters, achieving a desired look for simulated clothing can be laborious.
To ease this process, Disney Research and Walt Disney Animation Studios have developed a tool that enables technical directors who must create garments that are soft, silky, wrinkly, heavy, or flowing, to use those same terms to control the computer programs that fashion simulated cloth.
The ...
2015-08-05
Little details, such as the wrinkling or twitching of an eyelid, can have a big impact on whether a digitally rendered face looks real in a film or videogame. Now scientists at Disney Research have devised the first method to capture these subtleties of the eyelids in detail.
Their method, to be presented at ACM SIGGRAPH 2015, the International Conference on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques, in Los Angeles Aug. 9-13, captures detailed, dynamic skin features and creates plausible folding and stretching in areas that aren't directly captured during data collection.
Artists ...
2015-08-05
Obtaining the aerodynamic properties necessary to simulate falling leaves or a tumbling box caught by the wind can be as simple as dropping the object off of a balcony and recording the fall, thanks to OmniAD, a data-driven technique developed at Disney Research.
You would not want to design an airplane with this method, but the results are good enough for simulating aerodynamic effects of light, 3-D objects in videogames and animations, said Nobuyuki Umetani of Disney Research and Tobias Martin of ETH Zurich. The system can even be used to design kites that actually ...
2015-08-05
The same sort of video processing effects that usually require video to be shot in controlled environments where 3-D positions of cameras and objects are precisely known can be achieved with real-world, handheld video shot from consumer-grade cameras using a new approach pioneered by Disney Research.
The technique, developed with Braunschweig University of Technology, compensates for the lack of exact 3-D information about a scene by taking advantage of the fact that most elements of a scene are visible many times in a video. The researchers found they could sample pixels ...
2015-08-05
A 3D-printed teddy bear can have a stiff head, a pliable tummy and bendable arms, even though all of it is made of the same relatively stiff material, using a new method developed by Disney Research.
By using the printer to alter the small-scale structure of the material, the Disney researchers showed they could vary its elasticity dramatically within the same object. They developed families of compatible microstructures with varying elastic properties, enabling designers to select the properties desired for each region of an object.
The team demonstrated their new ...
LAST 30 PRESS RELEASES:
[Press-News.org] Exploring 'clinical conundrum' of asthma-COPD overlap in nonsmokers with chronic asthma
