Extract
With the fourth edition of this now eponymous tome, the new editors have once again brought together a wide range of over 80 experts in different aspects of cystic fibrosis (CF) care. The remit of this book is both wide ranging and deep, stretching to 49 chapters over 700 pages. The history of CF care and the people who have shaped it are described in their own chapter, but are, in fact, also laid bare in the evolving editions of this book. To get a feel for the incredible advances in basic understanding of and treatments available for CF, you only have to compare the length and contents of the current (fourth) edition with that of the second edition, published only 15 years earlier (had a copy of the first edition had been available for comparison, it’s doubtless that the differences would have appeared even starker). In no other field of respiratory medicine has there been such a revolution in clinical practice and outcomes. This disease of childhood, with a median life expectancy of only 24 years at the start of the century, has been transformed into a chronic disease of adulthood. Patient numbers have swelled accordingly, but with improvements in life expectancy have also come challenges created by managing a host of additional CF and treatment-related complications.
Abstract
Book review: Hodson and Geddes' Cystic Fibrosis (4th edition) edited by A. Bush et al. http://ow.ly/Y7eSP
Footnotes
Conflict of interest A. Horsley reports grants from National Institute of Health Research during the conduct of the study; grants from Vertex Pharmaceuticals and personal fees from Oxford University Press, outside the submitted work. A. Horsley is an editor and author of the ORML handbook on CF.
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