University of Wisconsin Severe Asthma Research Program III

The overall goal of this proposal is to better understand the basis of structural airway changes in severe asthma and how asthma exacerbations may contribute to their progression over time. The investigators propose to study a well-characterized cohort of adult and pediatric subjects with asthma using a multidisciplinary state-of-the-art approach. We hypothesize that severe asthma exacerbations, in some patients, are associated with incomplete recovery and activation of airway inflammatory cells in a regional distribution. The end result is a more permanent and less reversible airway obstruction that is a prominent feature of severe asthma.