touchREVIEWS in Respiratory & Pulmonary Diseases Volume 7, Issue 1, 2022

Welcome to the latest edition of touchREVIEWS in Respiratory & Pulmonary Diseases, which aims to provide insightful and topical articles relevant to the everyday practice of busy physicians. Our popular expert interviews provide a snapshot of hot topics in medicine. In the first of our interviews, Andrew Menzies-Gow discusses the clinical data leading to the US […]

Asthma affects around 339 million people worldwide,1 with approximately 10% of these experiencing severe disease.2 Despite many advances in asthma therapy in recent years, including the advent of biologic therapies, many patients with severe asthma cannot control their symptoms.2,3 Severe, uncontrolled asthma is extremely debilitating and involves frequent exacerbations, significant limitations on lung function and a reduced quality […]

Smoking is one of the biggest avoidable causes of morbidity and mortality worldwide and is a significant burden to healthcare systems. Without intervention, the annual total of 7.69 million deaths and 200 million disability-adjusted life-years caused by smoking are likely to increase over the coming decades.1 Several smoking cessation interventions have proven to be effective; however, […]

Coronavirus is a family of enveloped RNA viruses that include the original SARS coronavirus (SARS-CoV) and the recently emerged SARS-CoV-2. According to the World Health Organization, there have been over 500 million confirmed SARS-CoV-2 infections, and well over 6 million deaths from coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19).1 Although the recovery rate from COVID-19 is estimated to be […]

Asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) are disorders with predominantly chronic inflammatory airway features. They are increasingly recognized as entities on a heterogeneous obstructive airway disease continuum with distinct phenotypes, various degrees of overlap, and the predominance of asthma in some individuals and COPD in others.1 In asthma, chronic inflammation is driven by aberrant […]

With the advent of newer drugs targeting the biochemical pathways that lead to cough, it is increasingly important to understand the definition, pathogenesis and management of this symptom. Several specialist bodies also recognize the need for guidance in this area, and the American College of Chest Physicians (ACCP) and European Respiratory Society (ERS) have both […]

Paediatric sleep-disordered breathing (SDB) refers to a spectrum of respiratory disorders with intermittent upper-airway obstruction and sleep disruption in children.1 SDB spans primary snoring, upper-airway resistance syndrome, obstructive hypoventilation and obstructive sleep apnoea (OSA), listed in order of increasing severity of SDB stratified by polysomnography.2 Paediatric OSA is characterized by recurring episodes of airway obstruction, which […]

Electronic nicotine delivery systems, colloquially referred to as e-cigarettes (ECs), or vaping products were introduced in the US market in 2007 as an alternative to cigarette smoking. They were marketed as a better alternative to nicotine replacement therapy for stopping cigarette smoking, as ECs are considered less harmful than tobacco cigarette smoking.1 These findings have been […]