Airway wall remodelling in asthma: a novel target for the development of anti-asthma drugs.

The regulation of vascular smooth muscle proliferation has been examined extensively in recent years since the recognition that hyperplasia and hypertrophy of vascular smooth muscle are significant pathological features of hypertension and atherosclerosis. In this article, Alastair Stewart and colleagues discuss recent developments in the investigation of the pathology of asthma that indicate some parallels with the structural changes that occur in blood vessels in hypertension and atherosclerosis.