Use Of Sputum Induced By Hypertonic Saline To Evaluate The Airway Inflammation Of Asthmatics

Asthma is a kind of common and frequently ccurring disease. Characterized by leukocytes infiltration , congestion and edema of the mucosa, epithelium damage and so on, airway inflammation has been widely demonstrated in different phase of asthmatics. Inflammation play a centre role for the development of hyperresponsiveness, injury and remodeling of airway. So it is important to assess the airway inflammation for the diagnosis and management of asthma. Recently, the use of induced sputum has been proposed as a non nvasive method for research and assessment of asthmatic airway inflammation. In order to investigate the feasibility and applicability of the technique of examing induced sputum for assessing the airway inflammation,we compared leukocytes differential counts and inflammatory mediators of induced sputum, bronchial washing and bronchial mucosal biopsies from seven patients with asthma. The results showed the great correlation of the percentage of neutrophils, eosinophils, lymphocytes and the levels of eosinophil cationic protein (ECP) between induced sputum and bronchial washing and manifested that induced sputum adequately reflected the findings of fluid collected by direct bronchoscopy; By the analysis of constituent of induced sputum from 29 asthmatics, 30 patients with chronic bronchitis and 14 patients with non irway disease we found the good specificity and sensitivity of examination of ECP in induced sputum for reflecting the asthmatic airway inflammation;lYe also found that there was a higher percentage of neutrophils in the sputum from asthmatics,which suggested the possible importance of neutrophil in the pathogenic process of asthma; Furthermore,the outcome of examination displayed that the patients with chronic asthmatic bronchitis could be divided in two groups, the high levels of ECP and tryptase in the first group and the contrary in the second group, so that a conclusion could be drawn that a part of patients with chronic asthmatic bronchitis has the same nature of asthmatics.