Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) is one of the leading causes of morbidity and mortality in the industrialized and in the developing countries. Chronic bronchitis (CB) is one the three COPD clinico-pathological entities that in 2009 were estimated to be diagnosed in 9.9 million Americans. It is characterized by inflammation of the "bronchial tree" that results in tissue swelling and excessive secretions of mucus into the bronchi, with progressive airflow limitation. Our study aims to reveal the main morphological aspects of CB in our casuistry and to evaluate their correlation with major clinico-epidemiological parameters. Thus, we performed a retrospective clinical and morphological study on a group of 17 smoker patients with symptoms of chronic bronchitis, eight non-smokers diagnosed with chronic bronchitis and five non-smokers and asymptomatic subjects. We observed that CB developed especially in men of 65-year-old or older, especially in smokers with a median FEV1% at around 71. Histopathologically, patients with symptoms of CB, regardless of smoking status, presented on bronchial biopsies with focal squamous metaplastic change, goblet cell hyperplasia and enlargement of the bronchial gland mass because of the inflammatory process, consisting predominantly of mononuclear cells in the bronchial wall. The statistical testing proved a significant correlation between the densities of different inflammatory cell classes (with the exception of mast cells in the bronchial epithelium) and FEV1% values on epithelium and submucosa regions in all investigated groups.
