Paediatric Virology and its interaction between basic science and clinical practice (Review)

Mammas, Ioannis N.; Greenough, Anne; Theodoridou, Maria; Kramvis, Anna; Rusan, Maria; Melidou, Angeliki; Korovessi, Paraskevi; Papaioannou, Georgia; Papatheodoropoulou, Alexia; Koutsaftiki, Chryssie; Liston, Maria; Sourvinos, George; Spandidos, Demetrios A.

RSV is a common cause of wheezing that seems to dominate in the first year of an infant's life, during the winter period, causing mainly acute bronchiolitis, while RV is being detected as a causative agent for acute bronchiolitis and lower tract viral infections in older infants and children (103) . It remains to be clarified though, whether it is the specific viral respiratory infection that plays the causative role in asthmatogenesis or whether viral-induced wheezing is just a marker of predisposed individuals for the subsequent development of asthma (104) . It has been well demonstrated that there is an interaction of host factors with viral respiratory infections that promote recurrent virus-induced wheezing and the subsequent development of asthma (101) . The synergistic interaction between allergies and viruses can be explained via various mechanisms, such as interferon deficiency, Th2-biased immunity, defective anti-inflammatory response, airway hyper responsiveness and reduced barrier function (97, 103) . In a recent randomised trial of 429 high-risk infants, treatment with palivizumab of otherwise healthy preterm infants in order to avoid a serious RSV infection was associated with decreased recurrent wheezing rate when compared with the placebo group (105) . RSV causes cyto- pathic damage to the airway epithelium and by that can affect the function of the epithelium and airway smooth muscle (100) .