Abstract
To determine whether there is an airway IFN response in infants with acute bronchiolitis and to establish whether the rate of such a response is related to the severity of illness, the expression of some IFN-induced genes was measured in nasopharyngeal washes from 39 infants with acute bronchiolitis. The results indicate that in infants with a virus-associated acute bronchiolitis there is a strong activation of IFN system and that the severity of illness is inversely related to the level of expression of IFN-induced genes. This suggests that the IFN response plays an important role in determining virus–associated respiratory disease in early life.
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