Bibliogr. s. 31-33

Human rhinoviruses (HRV) are one of the nine genera belonging to a large family of Picornaviridae. They are responsible for the most cases of common cold, as well as one third to one half of upper respiratory tract (URT) infections. However, HRV are also associated with more severe illnesses, like acute otitis media, sinusitis and some lower respiratory tract diseases such as pneumonia, wheezing in children and exacerbations of asthma. Viral infections are associated with the majority of asthma exacerbations both in children (80-85%) and adults (75-80%), and about 60% of these are caused by HRV. However, the exact mechanism of HRV-induced exacerbations of the disease is not well understood, which makes it difficult to establish the effective treatment. There have already been many attempts to develop a sensitive and specific method of HRV detection in clinical samples. Some of them were based on virus cultures followed by acid lability test, whereas others implemented the reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) and amplification of conserved sequences of the rhinoviral genome. As numerous of these sequences are common to both rhinoviruses and enteroviruses (EVs), further analyses were necessary, which made those methods laborious, time-consuming and too difficult to use in routine diagnostics. Steininger et al. established an RT-PCR based sensitive and specific method of rhinovirus detection in clinical samples, which was tested to amplify 87 different tissue-culture-grown serotypes of HRV. The aim of this study was to evaluate a modified RT-PCR based method of HRV detection in clinical samples obtained from patients with asthma exacerbaions. We collected 41 nasal lavages from patients with asthma exacerbations who received hospital treatment either following an admission or in an out-patient clinic. HRV was found in 22 cases (54%), which corresponded well with the published data.