Signal Pathways Relating to Prevention and Treatment of Airway Remodeling in Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease with Traditional Chinese Medicine / 中国实验方剂学杂志

ABSTRACT

Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) is a common respiratory disease with a high morbidity, disability and mortality. At the same time, COPD is always accompanied by pulmonary hypertension, pulmonary fibrosis, chronic pulmonary heart disease, right heart failure and other common serious complications. All of these cause serious financial burden for the family of patients. Airway remodeling plays an important role in the pathogenesis of COPD. It is the progressive development of airflow restriction that induces the main symptoms of COPD, such as cough, asthma and depression. Therefore, it is of great research value to explore the intervention of traditional Chinese medicine(TCM) in the development of COPD by alleviating airway remodeling. Studies have shown that multiple signaling pathways can induce progressive airway remodeling, and the therapeutic effect of TCM has been frequently confirmed by experimental studies. TCM often has a therapeutic effect on COPD through multi-target and multi-channel mediation. This paper mainly includes five signaling pathways that traditional Chinese medicine can intervene COPD airway remodeling, namely matrix metalloproteinases (MMPs)/tissue inhibitors of metalloproteinase (TIMPs), transforming growth factor (TGF)-beta 1/Smads, RhoA/Rho-associated kinase (ROCK), vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF)/b-fibroblast growth factor (b-FGF) and nuclear factor (NF)-κB. This paper briefly reviews the research progress of these five signaling pathways, and discusses other signaling pathways that may be involved, in order to provide reference and ideas for future experimental research.