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Once upon a time it was infectious diseases like polio, measles or tuberculosis that most worried parents. With these threats now largely under control, parents face a new challenge – sky-rocketing rates of non-infectious diseases such as asthma, allergies and autism.
Dysphagia is an under recognised co-morbidity in patients with laryngomalacia. Its rate is variable reported in the literature. We aim to describe the incidence of dysphagia in laryngomalacia, the effect of interventions on this, and the period it persists in these infants.
A population of neutrophils recruited into cystic fibrosis (CF) airways is associated with proteolytic lung damage, exhibiting high expression of primary granule exocytosis marker CD63 and reduced phagocytic receptor CD16. Causative factors for this population are unknown, limiting intervention. Here we present a laboratory model to characterize responses of differentiated airway epithelium and neutrophils following respiratory infection.
Infants with cystic fibrosis (CF) develop structural lung disease early in life, and viral infections are associated with progressive lung disease. We hypothesized that the presence of respiratory viruses would be associated with structural lung disease on computed tomography (CT) of the chest in infants with CF.
Primary ciliary dyskinesia (PCD) is a rare, progressive, inherited ciliopathic disorder, which is incurable and frequently complicated by the development of bronchiectasis. There are few randomised controlled trials (RCTs) involving children and adults with PCD and thus evidence of efficacy for interventions are usually extrapolated from people with cystic fibrosis.
Wheezing and asthma exacerbations are leading causes of pediatric hospital admissions. Predicting which children will experience persistent exacerbations remains challenging. Prior research has identified immune endotypes in the nasal epithelium of children with acute asthma and wheezing, characterized by varying balances of interferons and inflammatory markers. Notably, children exhibiting low interferon responses coupled with high inflammation are at an increased risk for recurrent respiratory exacerbations.
Sometimes, there is an urgent need to administer inhaled adrenaline to children, awake, sedated or anaesthetised to treat asthma, bronchospasm, croup, and suspected laryngeal/pharyngeal oedema or stridor, which can become severe or even life-threatening. To better inform emergency dosing and administration guidelines, we aimed to quantify the amount of adrenaline delivered for inhalation from a nebuliser, in a simulated experimental delivery set-up for spontaneously breathing children and adults, either via an anaesthetic face mask, a Laryngeal Mask Airway or an Endotracheal tube.
Amniotic epithelial cells are fetal-derived stem cells, capable of differentiating into all three germ layers, including mature epithelial cell populations. Here, we hypothesised that the amniotic epithelium might serve as a surrogate tissue source for investigating transcriptional profiles in the respiratory epithelium of newborns.
he increasing adoption of high-throughput "omics" technologies has heightened the demand for standardized, scalable, and reproducible bioinformatics workflows. Nextflow and nf-core provide a robust framework for researchers, particularly early- and mid-career researchers (EMCRs), to navigate complex data analysis.
Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) is a complex disorder with a high degree of interindividual variability. Gastrointestinal dysfunction is common in patients with COPD and has been proposed to influence the clinical progression of the disease. Using the presence of bile acid(s) (BA) in bronchoalveolar lavage (BAL) fluid as a marker of gastric aspiration, we evaluated the relationships between BAs, clinical outcomes and bacterial lung colonisation.