Seeing Is Believing: Extravascular Platelet Recruitment in Asthma and Allergic Inflammation

Johansson offers insights about extravascular platelet recruitment in asthma and allergic inflammation. Shah and colleagues describe their assessment of platelet recruitment to extravascular compartments in lungs of patients with asthma and in mice challenged with house dust mite in models of allergic inflammation, and they detail the roles of chemokines and their receptors in the recruitment process. They detected increased platelets scattered throughout the epithelium and submucosa of bronchial biopsies from patients with asthma compared with biopsies from subjects without asthma.