Bronchial Asthma: Mechanisms and Therapeutics

From its first edition in 1976, Bronchial Asthma: Mechanisms and Therapeutics stood out as the most comprehensive on the subject. It was updated in 1985 and again in 1993, keeping up with the exponentially increasing information on a disease that has an estimated prevalence of about 5% and substantial human and financial losses. The increased asthma morbidity and mortality noted in the 1970s and 1980s, in spite of the development of "better" bronchodilators, is an outcry for better understanding and management of the disease. The designing of an effective management strategy necessitates not only an understanding of the pathogenesis of the disease in general but also of the specific intrinsic and extrinsic events in any particular patient.

This updated edition incorporates substantial revisions and the addition of many chapters. It comprises 95 chapters organized in a systematic way in three sections: "Mechanisms," "Diagnostics and Laboratory," and "Therapy and Patient