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Departments of 1 Pulmonary Diseases and 2 Immunology, Erasmus University Rotterdam, University Hospital Dijkzigt, 3015 GD Rotterdam, The Netherlands
Asthma is
characterized by both local infiltration of eosinophils in the
bronchial mucosa and bronchial hyperreactivity (BHR). A
detailed characterization of BHR implies analysis of a histamine or
methacholine dose-response curve yielding not only the dose at 20%
fall of baseline forced expiratory volume in 1 s
(FEV1), but also a plateau (P)
representing the maximal narrowing response in terms of percent change
in FEV1 and reactivity as the
steepest slope at 50% of P
(%FEV1/doubling dose). In the
baseline condition, the specific airway conductance (sGaw) may be
considered closely related to airway lumen diameter. In 20 nonsmoking
asthmatic patients, methacholine dose-response curves were obtained,
and a sigmoid model fit yielded the BHR indexes. Immunohistochemistry
with the monoclonal antibodies
(EG1 and
EG2) was used to recognize the total number of eosinophils and activated eosinophils, respectively. The number of activated eosinophils was significantly correlated to
both P (r = 0.62;
P < 0.05) and sGaw
(r = 
0.52;
P < 0.05), whereas weaker and
nonsignificant correlations were found for dose at 20% fall of
baseline FEV1 and the total number
of eosinophils. We conclude that the number of activated eosinophils
can be considered a marker of the inflammation-induced decrease of
airway lumen diameter as represented by the plateau index and sGaw.
bronchial mucosa; bronchial hyperreactivity; methacholine dose-response curve
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