SESSION 4 Is Asthma a Fibrotic Disease?*

IIamatic changes in the architecture of the airway walls have been described in severe and/or fatal asthma. Major goals in asthma research include the determination of mechanisms by which chronic allergic inflammation drives these structural changes and the determination of the relationships between altered airway function in asthma and specific structural changes. It is clear that ab-normal structure of extracellular matrix may contribute to altered airway mechanics in asthma, both through geo-metric effects and through direct changes in tissue biome-chanics. In addition, changes in matrix structure have ef-fects on cellular functions and may themselves modulate the physiologic process of inflammation. In this brief review, changes in the extracellular matrix in asthma and the likely functional consequences of some of these change