from today’s Medpage
DENVER — The “Mile High City” will be: the setting for the American Thoracic Society 2015 International Conference, which gets underway this weekend. The conference will bring together clinicians, researchers, public health experts, and educators for the latest in pulmonary, critical care, and sleep medicine.
Another high point will be the President’s Symposium, which is entitled “How to Cure a Disease: The Cystic Fibrosis Story.” Presented on Sunday afternoon, the symposium will be moderated by ATS President Thomas Ferkol Jr, MD, of Washington University School of Medicine in St Louis. This session will review the rapid advances and novel therapies in this field that are transforming patients’ lives and will continue to do so in the future.
The clinical program will feature a wide range of topics of interest including the use of pirfenidone (Esbriet) and nintedanib (Ofev) for idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, which will take place on Sunday morning.
“This session should be very popular,” said 2015 conference chair Irina Petrache, MD, of Indiana University in Indianapolis.
Another presentation of interest on Sunday, according to Petrache, will be a clinical trial comparing initial combination therapy with ambrisentan (Letairis) and tadalafil (Cialis) versus monotherapy for patients with pulmonary arterial hypertension.
There also will be a randomized, controlled trial of an exercise program for survivors of critical illness, and a study comparing underfeeding versus targeted enteral feeding in adults with critical illness.
A noteworthy study will be a pilot trial of phototherapy in hospitalized children with cystic fibrosis, scheduled for Sunday. “This will be very important,” Petrache stated. “A lot of these kids get depressive symptoms, and this could be treatment without drugs,” she told MedPage Today.
A topic that will be addressed from multiple standpoints is the use of e-cigarettes, with discussions of the effect of these products on cough reflex sensitivity, presented in a Tuesday poster session, the influence of mechanical and chemical components on inflammation, and whether e-cigarettes are useful for smoking cessation.
Multiple aspects of sleep apnea also will be featured, such as the use of pulmonary rehabilitation, and the high prevalence among patients undergoing percutaneous coronary intervention.
For chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, the focus will include the impact of poverty on prevalence, the effects of aspirin use for emphysema, and how concurrent lung disease affects mortality among patients with atrial fibrillation.
A Tuesday session “sure to generate significant buzz” is “ATS Mythbusters: Genomics Will Revolutionize Care of Chronic Lung Disease,” in which a panel of experts “will determine whether the myth is upheld or busted. There will be newsworthy statements in this session,” according to Naftali Kaminski, MD, chief of pulmonary, critical care and sleep medicine at Yale University, who organized the session.
The conference will conclude on Wednesday afternoon, when attendees will depart and return to their practices, armed with new and updated knowledge to improve their patients’ health and well-being.
LAST UPDATED 05.13.2015
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