Genetics of Asthma and Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease PDF

Preface

In the 10 years prior to the sequencing of the human genome (in 2000), much was learned about multifactorial diseases such as asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. However, as we now begin to apply genetics and genomics to human disease, even more will be gained from this phenomenal step forward, which will improve our insights into the pathophysiology of asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.

Asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease are diseases that affect the airways and lung parenchyma and are accompanied by respiratory symptoms and reduction in lung function, which is either reversible, as in asthma, or irreversible, as in chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. Asthma-a disease that flourished with the higher standard for living in the 20th century in Western industrialized countries-occurs in about 10% of the population worldwide. Asthma is especially burdensome to an individual patient, given its variability in severity over time and associated morbidity. Finally, childhood asthma may predispose a susceptibility to chronic obstructive pulmonary disease in adult life. We are seeing an astonishing increase in the number of deaths from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, already surpassing 125,000 worldwide on an annual basis and climbing steadily. Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease affects an individual's life tremendously, given the ongoing and progressive symptoms and associated exacerbations. Both diseases affect hundreds of millions of individuals in the world. Thus, it is of importance to dissect which factors contribute to disease development, progression, and remission. Understanding these factors will eventually contribute to better prevention and management of these diseases and, ultimately, to a cure. Because asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease are multifactorial diseases, i.e., they originate by gene-gene and gene-environment interactions operating in a developmental context, and the genetics of airways disease is proceeding at a rapid pace, it is timely to provide the current state-of-theart genetic research on airways disease.

This book in the series of Lung Biology in Health and Disease intends to assemble what we know today about the genetics of asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. It contains chapters on both human and animal studies (including genetic genomics), genome-wide screens, association studies in cases and controls, gene–environment interactions, proteomics, and microarrays. Therefore, we believe this book provides an important and timely update of the broad and rapidly changing field of asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease genetics. In the current book, we hope that the reader finds valuable novel ways to approach the genetics of asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.

The production of this volume has been helped by the stimulating support from the staff of Informa Healthcare and support from Dr. Claude Lenfant, who as the overall editor of the Lung Biology in Health and Disease series, provided the medium for this communication. We especially thank Mrs. Sandra Beberman who, despite everything that has occurred in her life, was a positive and supportive person behind this book.