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Figure 5 | Critical Care

Figure 5

From: Clinical review: Idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis acute exacerbations - unravelling Ariadne's thread

Figure 5

Different clinical settings characterized by diffuse alveolar damage (DAD) pathology. This non-proportional figure denotes the incoherence of the clinical significance of acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS), acute interstitial pneumonia (AIP), and idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF) exacerbations in which DAD, despite being the common denominator, develops upon different histology substrates (UIP in IPF exacerbations, normal lungs in AIP, and normal or diseased lungs in ARDS) and, according to current definitions, presents at different time intervals: 7 days for ARDS, 4 weeks for IPF exacerbations, and 2 months for AIP. This incoherence led also to a different pharmacologic approach, which proved to be unsuccessful at least in AIP and in IPF true exacerbations. ALI, acute lung injury.

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