Lung emphysema revisited
Lung emphysema represents a major public health burden and still accounts for 5% of all deaths worldwide. Hence, it is essential to further understand this disease in order to develop effective diagnostic and therapeutic strategies. In our focused series, we highlight this disease from several aspects beginning with advances in imaging, going through developments of surgical and interventional therapies of lung volume reduction, perioperative anesthesiologic considerations, and giving an overview of the different phenotypes of chronic obstructive disease and correlations between lung cancer and lung emphysema, and concluding with lung transplantation for lung emphysema.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Teresa Lin for her great effort and support during the preparation and completion of this series.
Funding: None.
Footnote
Provenance and Peer Review: This article was commissioned by the editorial office, Annals of Translational Medicine for the series “Lung Emphysema”. The article did not undergo external peer review.
Conflicts of Interest: The author has completed the ICMJE uniform disclosure form (available at http://dx.doi.org/10.21037/atm-2019-le-08). The series “Lung Emphysema” was commissioned by the editorial office without any funding or sponsorship. BR served as the unpaid Guest Editor of the series and serves as an unpaid editorial board member of Annals of Translational Medicine from Oct 2019 to Sep 2021. The author has no other conflicts of interest to declare.
Ethical Statement: The author is accountable for all aspects of the work in ensuring that questions related to the accuracy or integrity of any part of the work are appropriately investigated and resolved.
Open Access Statement: This is an Open Access article distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), which permits the non-commercial replication and distribution of the article with the strict proviso that no changes or edits are made and the original work is properly cited (including links to both the formal publication through the relevant DOI and the license). See: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/.
