Pathogenesis and treatment of chemical-induced lung injury

Inhalation of chemical substances can cause irritation to airways and in high doses acute airway injury. When mice are exposed to the alkylating nitrogen mustard analogue melphalan they develop an acute airway inflammation with a rapid influx of neutrophils to the lungs. The acute phase is followed by long-term respiratory complications characterized by bronchitis, lung fibrosis, and airway hyperreactivity. In this thesis, a mouse model for chemical airway inflammation was established and the effects on the lungs in a time span from 6 hours up to 3 months were investigated in order to study both acute effects and possible chronic injury. We find that treatment with corticosteroids, e.g. dexamethasone, effectively blocks the inflammatory reaction in several ways: Neutrophil influx to the lungs is diminished, the expression of the proinflammatory cytokines interleukin (IL) -6 and IL-1b is decreased and edema formation as well as development of lung fibrosis is mitigated. In acute airway inflammation we show that the antioxidant vitamin E can be used as a possible complement to corticosteroids but not as a replacement since it causes insufficient downregulation of the inflammatory response. We show the importance of the T lymphocytes as they play a prominent role in the pathogenesis of long-term lung injuries caused by melphalan. Especially the minor gd T cell subset is of major importance orchestrating a number of responses including the acute cytokine and neutrophil response and late-phase lung fibrosis. In order to find the critical time for dexamethasone treatment, mice were exposed to melphalan, treated with dexamethasone at specific time points and lung physiology and airway reactivity was measured in anaesthetized, tracheostomized mice using a small animal ventilator. From these results we conclude that an early treatment, i.e. within one hour after exposure, with dexamethasone is needed to prevent chronic lung injury. This thesis was undertaken with the main goal to better understand the pathogenesis of melphalan-induced airway inflammation. We believe that our findings have shed new light in this area of research and hope that this increased knowledge may be of future clinical use