Airway, lung and gas exchange disorders.
10 topics · 10 curated works
No prior grounding assumed.
Global Strategy for Asthma Management and Prevention
Global Initiative for Asthma · 1995
Sets out stepwise, symptom-guided treatment escalation as the international standard for asthma care, reframing the disease from one treated…
Assumes you know the vocabulary.
Acute Respiratory Distress in Adults
David G. Ashbaugh, David B. Bigelow, Thomas L. Petty & Bernard E. Levine · 1967
Describes twelve patients with a shared pattern of severe breathlessness, stiff lungs and low blood oxygen unresponsive to standard oxygen therapy,…
+1 more at this level
Primary sources and full treatments.
De l'auscultation médiate, ou traité du diagnostic des maladies des poumons et du coeur
René Théophile Hyacinthe Laennec · 1819
Introduces the stethoscope and mediate auscultation, then systematically correlates the sounds it reveals with lesions found at autopsy — founding…
+6 more at this level
10 works
Global Initiative for Asthma
Sets out stepwise, symptom-guided treatment escalation as the international standard for asthma care, reframing the disease from one treated reactively during attacks to one controlled proactively with regular preventive therapy.
link checked 17 Sept 2026David G. Ashbaugh, David B. Bigelow, Thomas L. Petty & Bernard E. Levine
Describes twelve patients with a shared pattern of severe breathlessness, stiff lungs and low blood oxygen unresponsive to standard oxygen therapy, naming and defining what became known as acute respiratory distress syndrome.
Richard Doll, Richard Peto, Jillian Boreham & Isabelle Sutherland
Follows the original British doctors cohort for fifty years to show that about half of long-term smokers are killed by the habit, and that quitting at any age recovers years of life otherwise lost.
link checked 17 Sept 2026René Théophile Hyacinthe Laennec
Introduces the stethoscope and mediate auscultation, then systematically correlates the sounds it reveals with lesions found at autopsy — founding physical diagnosis of chest disease and modern clinical medicine's reliance on instrument-aided physical signs.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Charles Fletcher & Richard Peto
Shows, from an eight-year study of working men, that lung function declines steadily with age and drops faster in smokers, but that quitting at any point returns the rate of decline to normal.
link checked 17 Sept 2026PIOPED Investigators
Compares ventilation-perfusion scan results against pulmonary angiography across many hospitals and finds the scan alone often cannot confirm or exclude embolism, showing why it must be combined with clinical probability rather than read in isolation.
Terry Young et al.
Uses in-laboratory sleep studies on a population sample, rather than clinic patients alone, to show disordered breathing during sleep is far more common than previously believed.
link checked 17 Sept 2026M. R. Miller et al.
Sets internationally agreed technical standards for performing and interpreting spirometry, arguing that inconsistent technique across clinics and studies had been quietly degrading lung function as a diagnostic and research measure.
Ganesh Raghu et al.
Sets out CT and biopsy criteria for diagnosing idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis without a confident histological diagnosis, and grades the evidence behind each treatment recommendation using a formal evidence framework rather than expert opinion alone.
link checked 17 Sept 2026American Thoracic Society and Infectious Diseases Society of America
Updates evidence-based recommendations for diagnosing and treating adult pneumonia acquired outside hospital, notably dropping the healthcare-associated pneumonia category after finding it poorly predicted drug-resistant infection.
link checked 17 Sept 2026