Severe asthma and the omalizumab option 英文参考文献.docVIP

Clinical and Molecular Allergy BioMedCentral Review Open Access Severe asthma and the omalizumab option Christopher WT Miller1, Narayanaswamy Krishnaswamy2, Chambless Johnston1 and Guha Krishnaswamy*2 Address: 1Department of Medicine, Quillen College of Medicine, Johnson City, TN, USA and 2Division of Allergy and Clinical Immunology, Quillen College of Medicine, Johnson City, TN, USA Email: Christopher WT Miller - cwtmiller@.br; Narayanaswamy Krishnaswamy - KRISHNAS@; Chambless Johnston - chamj22@; Guha Krishnaswamy* - KRISHNAS@ * Corresponding author Published: 20 May 2008 Received: 29 December 2007 Accepted: 20 May 2008 Clinical and Molecular Allergy 2008, 6:4 doi:10.1186/1476-7961-6-4 This article is available from: /content/6/1/4 ? 2008 Miller et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Abstract Atopic diseases and asthma are increasing at a remarkable rate on a global scale. It is now well recognized that asthma is a chronic inflammatory disease of the airways. The inflammatory process in many patients is driven by an immunoglobulin E (IgE)-dependent process. Mast cell activation and release of mediators, in response to allergen and IgE, results in a cascade response, culminating in B lymphocyte, T lymphocyte, eosinophil, fibroblast, smooth muscle cell and endothelial activation. This complex cellular interaction, release of cytokines, chemokines and growth factors and inflammatory remodeling of the airways leads to chronic asthma. A subset of patients develops severe airway disease which can be extremely morbid and even fatal. While many treatments are available for asthma, it is still a chronic and incurable disease, characterized by exacerbation, hospitalizatio