Journal
AMERICAN JOURNAL OF PHYSIOLOGY-LUNG CELLULAR AND MOLECULAR PHYSIOLOGY
Volume 307, Issue 4, Pages L338-L344Publisher
AMER PHYSIOLOGICAL SOC
DOI: 10.1152/ajplung.00094.2014
Keywords
developmental biology; stereology; alveolar growth
Categories
Funding
- National Institutes of Health [P01-ES-0628, OD-011107]
Ask authors/readers for more resources
Alveolarization in humans and nonhuman primates begins during prenatal development. Advances in stereological counting techniques allow accurate assessment of alveolar number; however, these techniques have not been applied to the developing human lung. Based on the recent American Thoracic Society guidelines for stereology, lungs from human autopsies, ages 2 mo to 15 yr, were fractionated and isometric uniform randomly sampled to count the number of alveoli. The number of alveoli was compared with age, weight, and height as well as growth between right and left lungs. The number of alveoli in the human lung increased exponentially during the first 2 yr of life but continued to increase albeit at a reduced rate through adolescence. Alveolar numbers also correlated with the indirect radial alveolar count technique. Growth curves for human alveolarization were compared using historical data of nonhuman primates and rats. The alveolar growth rate in nonhuman primates was nearly identical to the human growth curve. Rats were significantly different, showing a more pronounced exponential growth during the first 20 days of life. This evidence indicates that the human lung may be more plastic than originally thought, with alveolarization occurring well into adolescence. The first 20 days of life in rats implies a growth curve that may relate more to prenatal growth in humans. The data suggest that nonhuman primates are a better laboratory model for studies of human postnatal lung growth than rats.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available