Understanding Allergic Asthma from Allergen Inhalation Tests
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abstract
The allergen challenge has evolved, in less than 150 years, from a crude tool used to document the etiology of allergen‐induced disease to a well‐controlled tool used today to investigate the pathophysiology and pharmacotherapy of asthma. Highlights of the authors’ involvement with the allergen challenge include confirmation of the immunoglobulin E‐dependence of the late asthmatic response, importance of (nonallergic) airway hyper‐responsiveness as a determinant of the airway response to allergen, identification of allergen‐induced increase in airway hyper‐responsiveness, documentation of beta2‐agonist‐induced increase in airway response to allergen (including eosinophilic inflammation), advances in understanding the pathophysiology and kinetics of allergen‐induced airway responses, and development of a muticentre clinical trial group devoted to using the allergen challenge for investigating promising new therapeutic strategies for asthma.
