Exercise-induced Bronchoconstriction

The invitation by the editor, Rafeul Alam, to guest edit this issue on exercise-induced bronchoconstriction (EIB) allowed me to bring together investigators from physiology to cellular biology of EIB. The preface contains information on how some of the contributors came together and identifies some conferences that helped broaden the scientific research in EIB in asthmatic children to include healthy elite athletes. The contributors come from Australia, Canada, Denmark, England, France, Israel, Sweden, Netherlands, and the United States and trained in pediatric, respiratory, and sports medicine and science. Most have either obtained a doctoral degree in EIB or supervised one. My first encounter with EIB was at Royal Prince Alfred Hospital, in Sydney, in 1968. In January 1970 I started research in EIB with Simon Godfrey in the Department of Paediatrics at the Brompton Hospital in London. Over the next 3 years, under Simon’s enthusiastic guidance, a group of us carried out many studies on various aspects of EIB. In 1968 Ken Fitch from Perth, Australia observed severe EIB when supervising an exercise test on an 18-year-old asthmatic Olympic swimmer, who 3 months later won an Olympic Gold Medal in Mexico. This induced Ken to do his MD in EIB. Both Simon and Ken’s laboratories were coincidentally investigating the effect of different forms of exercise to provoke EIB. In 1971, both laboratories reported running as the most provocative exercise. Being ahead of their time, Ken and Simon wrote an article in 1976 on the topic of Asthma and Athletic Performance. They now celebrate the 50 years of research since the modern description of EIB in children by R.S. Jones of Liverpool, United Kingdom, in 1962. In 1973 Simon moved to the Hammersmith Hospital and later, in 1977, to Israel, where he continued his studies, among many others, on refractoriness and EIB. The article by Larsson and coworkers discusses these early studies and presents a new hypothesis to explain refractoriness following EIB.