The patho-physiological mechanism of bronchial narrowing in bronchial asthma has been studied by several investigators and, as the principal factors, which are attributable to this phenomenon, spasm of the bronchial smooth muscle, edema of the bronchial mucous membraneand hyper-secretion have been proposed. However, there have been no direct evidence for a participation of these factors to bronchial narrowing in asthmatic attack.
Therefore, we have introduced the new clinical methods for the purpose of clarifying directly the exact mechanism of bronchial narrowing during asthmatic attack and applying these new methods to a asthmatic patient, and we have obtained several new and interesting results.

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Bronchial asthma is one of the diseases related to hereditary factors. Although it is divided into four types clinically like atopic, infectious, mixed and intrinsic types, the essential facts recognized generally are that they have an ability of reagin formation stimulating by the antigen inhalation and also a high sensitivity to the chemical mediators as histamine or acetylcholine.
Therefore, the effect of air pollution upon the asthmatic patients shall be analysed in this paper from those two aspects.

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Characteristic features of the bronchial asthma in aged persons were studied
from the several points of view.

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Death from bronchial asthma is considered not to be so rare as mentioned in the past. In 342 fatal asthmatics of all ages including 125 autopsy cases collected from literature, enquétes and self-experienced cases from 1919 to 1968, the number of them increased by years gradually and reached the maximum in 1965. Of these cases three-fourth died during paroxysm. Amongthem 70% died from suffocation, 15% from deuteropathies of asthma and remaining 15% from accidents related to therapy or complications. The majority of fatal asthmatics were those of severe chronic mixed type except some of mild paroxysmal type. Accordingly, severe asthmatic attack or deuteropathies occurred in the course of asthma was thought to be significant as the cause of death. At the beginning of this report severe asthma was defined. Then characteristics of severe asthma and factors to deteriorate asthmatics were studied comparing severe asthmatics with asthmatic fatalities and mild and/or moderately severe asthmatics. The prognosis and therapy of severe asthmatics were also investigated.

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Although arteriosclerosis is one of the most important disorders in clinical medicine, at the present time there are only a few methods for detecting the severity of the disorder without any surgical procedures.
In the rheological sense, arteriosclerosis can be understood as a loss of elasticity of the vessel wall so that the transmission velocity of the pulse wave through the arteries along its longitudinal axis could reflect sclerotic grade of the artery. Sclerosis of the aorta generally precedes that seen in arteries of other organs such as cerebral and coronary arteries whose sclerosis causes a fatal process.^{1, 2, 3)} Thus, the measurement of sclerotic grade of the aorta should have a clinical significance to predict arteriosclerosis of organ arteries.
This report presents a pulse wave velocity method (PWV) as a quantitative estimation of aortic sclerosis based on the rheological study of the systemic circulatory system⁴⁾, relationships between the PWV and pathological findings⁵⁾ and finally a clinical application of the PWV method⁶⁾.

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