What cause inflammation of the lungs?
what causes inflammation of the lungs
Answer:
Scientists at Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh of UPMC enjoy identified a protein that is critical to the nouns of inflammation during lung infection in patients near cystic fibrosis (CF). The identification of this protein, call interleukin-23 (IL-23), is an important finding that give researchers a specific target for developing new therapy.
In June 2005, Children's and University of Pittsburgh researchers led by Children's pulmonologist and immunologist Jay K. Kolls, MD, reported that IL-23 and another cytokine, interleukin-17, are elevated within CF patients with chronic lung infections. The hottest research by Dr. Kolls and Children's pulmonologist Patricia Dubin, MD, pinpoints IL-23 as the crucial mediator to this inflammatory response. Results of this study are in a minute published online in the American Journal of Physiology-Lung Cellular and Molecular Physiology.
Many patients next to CF develop chronic lung infections from a strain of bacteria specified as Pseudomonas aeruginosa. During chronic infection, the inflammatory response is never "shut off", and the continuous inflammation, mediated by IL-23 and other cytokines, may eventually organize to lung damage.
"Understanding the role IL-23 plays surrounded by the inflammatory pathway of CF patients is a major step forward that could head to the development of investigational therapies to block this inflammation," said Dr. Kolls, chief of the Division of Pulmonary Medicine, Allergy and Immunology at Children's and professor of Pediatrics and Immunology at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. "For patients beside chronic infections associated with CF, this eventually could close-fisted a prolonged life span and an enhanced quality of life span."