Winter 2001 - Newsletter
Sports & Exercise
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Highlights From The 2000 North American Cystic Fibrosis Conference
by J.P. Clancy, M.D.
As many of you know, the CF Foundation sponsors an international conference every fall to bring researchers and doctors together. This year's conference was in Baltimore, MD, and was a big success. The CF Foundation provides detailed summaries of the meeting, and you can find more in-depth information at their website. This short summary is intended to give you what I felt were meeting highlights.
1. The first highlight is that the CF Foundation Therapeutic Development Network is in the process of completing and starting several trials in CF patients, banding different care centers together to speed up the process. Two human studies that you may hear about this year include studies of a new use of the antibiotic, Zithromax, and a new lipid formulation (DHA) in CF patients.
2. Researchers are learning about some important basic ways in which the airways control the fluid and mucus that they make, and this information may change how we look at CF. One discovery is that the pH of CF mucus may be different than people without CF, which may explain why it is so think and sticky. Another is that new techniques may allow researchers to measure the amount of salt in the thin airway lining fluid. This fluid is believed to be critical to the development of CF lung disease.
I hope this summary gives you a sense of the enthusiasm and excitement going on in CF research. We don't have a cure yet, but every year we cross another threshold to get us there. A more extensive article that I've written is available about this on our Birmingham Cystic Fibrosis Center website.