Abstract
Respiratory diseases represent one of the largest health problems world wide. Asthma and the smoking related diseases are already common and increasing so we urgently need better approaches to treat or cure these diseases. At the same time, new respiratory diseases such as those associated with viruses threaten pandemics that challenge our national health systems.
With these continued challenges for new treatment with better patient care, clinical and respiratory researchers have sought better approaches to all aspects of patient care from improved diagnoses to superior therapies. This has lead to an explosion of new research with an increasingly better understanding of how to diagnose diseases and then develop new therapies. Thus, for example ever improving technologies for imaging lung disease have lead to increasingly better diagnoses, although challenges remain as we seek to further improve resolution. At the same time, the revolution in molecular biology, culminating with the publication of the complete human genome, has lead to hopes for finding more precise clues to disease susceptibility pathogenesis in genetic analysis. This is leading to new concepts in pharmacogenomics as we start to use new drugs, including those used for lung cancers, being directed at mutations associated with disease.
This is the first Encyclopaedia of Respiratory Medicine. It is our hope that it is comprehensive and captures the key aspects of current patient ...
Original language | English |
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Title of host publication | Encyclopedia of Respiratory Medicine |
Editors | G Laurent, S Shapiro |
Place of Publication | UK |
Publisher | Academic Press |
Pages | 606 - 613 |
Number of pages | 8 |
Edition | 1st |
ISBN (Print) | 9780124383609 |
Publication status | Published - 2006 |