ABSTRACT
For decades, asthma has been considered a condition of reversible airflow obstruction, and in the majority of patients, complete reversiblity of long standing abnormal spirometric measurements, such as FEVi, may be observed after treatment. However, many asthmatics, both children and adults, have evidence of residual airway obstruction, which may even be detected in asymptomatic patients. This clinically demonstrable irreversible component of the airways obstruction was observed on pathological findings at the turn of the century (1) and already proposed in the definition of asthma in 1962 (2). However, these features were almost completely ignored for a long time and the concept of airway remodeling in asthma was only proposed in 1992
Remodeling is defined in the Concise Oxford Dictionary as “ model again or differently, reconstruct.” This is a critical aspect of wound repair in all organs representing a dynamic process that associates matrix production and degradation in reaction to an inflammatory insult (4) leading to a normal
(3).
