University of Pittsburgh Asthma Institute at UPMC and the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA.
Nat Med. 2012 May 4;18(5):716-25. doi: 10.1038/nm.2678.
Although asthma has been considered as a single disease for years, recent studies have increasingly focused on its heterogeneity. The characterization of this heterogeneity has promoted the concept that asthma consists of multiple phenotypes or consistent groupings of characteristics. Asthma phenotypes were initially focused on combinations of clinical characteristics, but they are now evolving to link biology to phenotype, often through a statistically based process. Ongoing studies of large-scale, molecularly and genetically focused and extensively clinically characterized cohorts of asthma should enhance our ability to molecularly understand these phenotypes and lead to more targeted and personalized approaches to asthma therapy.
尽管哮喘多年来一直被认为是一种单一的疾病，但最近的研究越来越关注其异质性。这种异质性的特征描述促进了这样一种概念，即哮喘由多种表型或一致的特征分组组成。哮喘表型最初侧重于临床特征的组合，但现在正在发展为将生物学与表型联系起来，通常通过基于统计学的过程。正在进行的大规模、分子和遗传为重点的研究，以及对哮喘进行广泛临床特征描述的队列研究，应该增强我们从分子上理解这些表型的能力，并导致更有针对性和个性化的哮喘治疗方法。
