Asthma endotypes: a new approach to classification of disease entities within the asthma syndrome

J Lötvall, CA Akdis, LB Bacharier, L Bjermer… - Journal of Allergy and …, 2011 - Elsevier
It is increasingly clear that asthma is a complex disease made up of number of disease
variants with different underlying pathophysiologies. Limited knowledge of the mechanisms
of these disease subgroups is possibly the greatest obstacle in understanding the causes of
asthma and improving treatment and can explain the failure to identify consistent genetic
and environmental correlations to asthma. Here we describe a hypothesis whereby the
asthma syndrome is divided into distinct disease entities with specific mechanisms, which …