Asthma and COPD overlap pathophysiology of ACO

Abstract

Asthma and COPD appear as a result of different mechanisms triggered by different pathogeneses and although they present different features and symptoms of airway inflammation and airway obstruction, there are also cases that present the features of both asthma and COPD. This type of pathology is known as asthma-COPD overlap syndrome (ACOS). Asthma-COPD overlap is identified in clinical practice by the features that it shares with both asthma and COPD. This is not a definition, but a description for clinical use, as asthma-COPD overlap includes several different clinical phenotypes and there are likely to be several different underlying mechanisms”. In this paper, the disease that shares several features of both asthma and COPD will be referred to as asthma-COPD overlap (ACO). In this article, we describe the pathogenesis of ACO for understanding the mechanism in asthma and COPD overlap.