The role of female hormones on lung function in chronic lung diseases

BMC Women's Health

Review

Don Morrish¹  Don D Sin²  Samuel Wadsworth²  Anthony Tam²  Delbert Dorscheid²  SF Paul Man² 

[1] Department of Medicine, The University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB, Canada;The UBC James Hogg Research Centre, Providence Heart + Lung Centre & Department of Medicine, University of British Columbia (UBC), Vancouver, BC, Canada;

关键词: lung function;    menstrual cycle;    sex hormones;    asthma;    cystic fibrosis;    COPD;   

DOI  :  10.1186/1472-6874-11-24

 received in 2010-08-30, accepted in 2011-06-03,  发布年份 2011

来源: Springer

【 摘 要 】

BackgroundThe prevalence, morbidity, and mortality of inflammatory lung diseases such as asthma, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and cystic fibrosis (CF) are increasing in women. There is a dearth of data on the biological mechanisms to explain such observations. However, some large epidemiologic studies suggest that lung function fluctuates during the menstrual cycle in female patients with airways disease but not in women without disease, suggesting that circulating estradiol and progesterone may be involved in this process.DiscussionIn asthma, estradiol shuttles adaptive immunity towards the TH2 phenotype while in smokers estrogens may be involved in the generation of toxic intermediate metabolites in the airways of female smokers, which may be relevant in COPD pathogenesis. In CF, estradiol has been demonstrated to up-regulate MUC5B gene in human airway epithelial cells and inhibit chloride secretion in the airways. Progesterone may augment airway inflammation.SummaryTaken together, clinical and in-vivo data have demonstrated a sex-related difference in that females may be more susceptible to the pathogenesis of lung diseases. In this paper, we review the effect of female sex hormones in the context of these inflammatory airway diseases.

【 授权许可】

Unknown   
© Tam et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. 2011. This article is published under license to BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.