Novel Insight into Pulmonary Fibrosis and Long COVID
Jan C. Kamp, Christopher Werlein, Edith Plucinski, Lavinia Neubert, Tobias Welte, Peter Lee, Paul Tafforeau, Claire Walsh, Mark Kuehnel, Detlef Schuppan, Marius M. Hoeper, Danny Jonigk, Maximilian Ackermann
Abstract
participants moving from relatively low-risk to high-risk subgroups of future diseases, such as chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.As highlighted by Guo and colleagues, and also discussed elsewhere (5), this highlights the importance of taking the heterogeneity of processes that can lead to chronic airway obstruction into account (e.g., bronchopulmonary dysplasia after preterm birth as one specific example) (6).Whether the growth failure group will experience the same (or different) lung aging process as the persistently low group needs to be explored in future studies (7).As pointed out in an accompanying editorial by Custovic and Fontanella (8), the potential respiratory consequences of moving from a higher to a normal group will also have to be explored.Finally, we agree with Guo and colleagues that different trajectory models and predictive scores should be evaluated in different studies and populations to define normal versus abnormal trajectories for clinical use, thus allowing for interventions in those at risk of lung function growth failure and/or accelerated decline.We believe that a life-course approach incorporating genetics with both early and adult life events are, to date, the best alternative to better understand the pathogenesis of chronic respiratory disease through the lifetime (9).