Respiration Day - Chronic Airway Diseases And Their Comorbidities

The aim of the 2026 Edition of "Respiration Day" is to provide the view of where the Respiratory clinicians and researchers are and where they are heading in the field of chronic respiratory diseases, particularly chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), asthma, bronchiectasis and their comorbidities, and the role of small airway diseases in these respiratory diseases. The main aim of the meeting is educational, and the speakers have been specifically invited to translate in their lectures the most important recent discoveries to the potential improvement of clinical practice. A significant proportion of time (40%) will be devoted to discussion. The Meeting is divided in 5 sessions.

The first session will focus on the recent advancements in COPD and its comorbidities, and in particular the first lecture will focus on the need to better characterize the different phenotypes included under the umbrella of the term COPD, both in term of etiology and clinical presentation, early diagnosis, and active search of multimorbidity to improve the management of individual patients (Bhatt et al, 2025; Celli et al, 2022). The second lecture will be devoted to novel therapies for COPD, particularly the biologics, with the aim of improved comprehensive and personalized management (Agusti et al, 2025). The third lecture will focus on the major cardiovascular risk in patients with COPD, both in stable and during and in the aftermath of exacerbations of respiratory symptoms (Gale et al, 2025).

The second session will focus on asthma as a disease of both central and peripheral airways (Siddiqui et mal, 2026), the need of integration of traditional pharmacological inhalation treatments with systemic agents and/or biologics (Porsbjerg et al, 2023), the third the ongoing research focused on mechanisms rather than clinical treatable traits (Gaberino et al, 2026).

The third session will be devoted to the importance and impact of small airways dysfunction for chronic airway diseases, and in particular on the fundamental role of inhalers but also of their environmental impact, its complex impact on respiratory and non-respiratory components of chronic airway diseases, and last, but not least, how can AI help us to understand the role of small airways dysfunction.

The fourth session will be devoted to the novel discoveries in the field of pathology of chronic airway diseases, and particularly the importance of mucus plugs, and mucociliary clearance.

Finally the fifth session will be devoted to bronchiectasis that in the last 15 years has been discovered to represent not only a treatable trait of other chronic airway diseases but also an independent treatable disease (Burgel and Mall, 2026; Chalmer et al, 2025).