Data from 188 patients attending due to suspected SDB were prospectively audited. Member (ECM) with the ERS defining an ECM as anyone under age of 40 years. Some of the newly titled ECM Committee have collated some interesting points that occurred during Congress for their assemblies, which should be of interest to all members. == Assembly 1 == The largest ERS Assembly (Clinical) had a wide variety of educational, clinical and scientific classes to offer its members this year. During the 1st day from the conference, many skills workshops focusing on techniques used in daily clinical practice were available as well as postgraduate courses focusing on giving the attendees specialists opinions and insights into various disease areas, the management of rare diseases, and diagnostic approaches. The Sunday morning started with all the presentation of the best abstracts in asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) as well as pulmonary rehabilitation and chronic care, attracting a large masses eager to hear about the latest development in all those particular fields. Afterwards, one of the symposia took a look into the future of clinical treatment, focusing on telemonitoring of ventilator-dependent patients. A highlight of every conference is the many poster discussion classes and thematic poster classes that facilitate the conversation between specialists in the respective fields as well as early career members showing their data. Some of these classes (e. g. the poster discussions about biomarkers and phenotypes of COPD and comorbidities) attracted so many participants that not everybody could fit into the designated room. Further highlights intended for newcomers and for seasoned participants alike were VTP-27999 HCl the grand rounds and Year in Review sessions, which were very well received. == Assembly 2 == The presentations and abstracts in the respiratory critical treatment track were of very high quality this year. VTP-27999 HCl A highlight from the conference was the symposium on new tools for the early diagnosis of acute respiratory stress syndrome (ARDS). The main communication that was echoed during the symposium was that we should no longer consider ARDS as a final diagnosis. Within the syndrome, there Rabbit Polyclonal to BCL2 (phospho-Ser70) are several subgroups that respond differently to treatment. Paolo Pelosi (Milan, Italy) showed that therapeutic options are time dependent and that ARDS can be prevented with all the appropriate supportive care, while Antonio Artigas (Sabadell, Spain) defended the importance the measurement of extravascular lung water to guide fluid strategy. Carolyn Calfee (San Francisco, CA, USA) went one step further: the lady used unsupervised analysis to group patients with a similar biological response together. There seems to be a relatively small portion of patients with a strong inflammatory response that are responsible for most of the mortality in the intensive treatment unit. Because these patients were derived from several randomised controlled trials, she could deduce the patients who were in a hyperinflammatory state benefitted from increased levels of positive end-expiratory pressure and a conservative fluid protocol. The presenter argued that these results may bring a paradigm shift to the treatment of ARDS patients, after they are validated in observational cohort studies and tested in prospective biomarker-guided intervention studies. == Assembly three or more == At this years Congress, one term was omnipresent: precision medicine. The US National Institutes of Health determine precision medicine as a groundbreaking approach to disease prevention and treatment based on peoples individual differences in environment, genes and lifestyle (www.nih.gov/precision-medicine-initiative-cohort-program). In fact , US President Barack Obama offers launched a Precision Medicine Initiative in his 2015 State from the Union treat to avoid further one-size-fits-all methods in modern medicine. In oncology, this has been already done for decades on a genetic level where patients obtain a selective, and thereby the most effective, treatment based on their individual mutations VTP-27999 HCl in disease-relevant genes. In respiratory diseases, one emerging example continues to be discussed past others: in asthmatic patients, treatment with antibodies focusing on key cytokines, such as interleukin (IL)-4, IL-5 or IL-13, is only effective in patients with an eosinophilic, allergic asthma phenotype, for which they should be screened beforehand by biomarkers such as periostin levels. However , it was addressed in various classes at the Congress that the individuals environment, diet or lifestyles have been mainly neglected up to now. One proposition was to include microbiome analysis in patient characterisations, because the microbiome will, on the one hand, mirror differences in environment or diet, but on the other hand, might also effect the treatment efficacy itself by modulating the hosts.