Use of Modeling to Inform Tuberculosis Elimination Strategies

airways with higher BMI, and the amount of airway fat correlates with wall thickness and the number of inflammatory cells (13).Airway adipose tissue accumulation by itself may therefore partly explain some of the changes seen in asthma, including airway narrowing and remodeling.Future studies should examine whether excess visceral and/or pericardial fat in children denotes a phenotype of obesity that tends to accumulate adipose tissue in certain organs, including the airways.We must also learn whether certain adiposity distribution profiles have a more immediate proinflammatory effect on the lungs.The BMI will certainly continue to play an important role in epidemiological studies of obesity (and consequently of obese asthma).But in the era of big data, detailed phenotyping, multiomics, gene editing, and machine-learning, we owe it to our patients to shift our focus to a more nuanced approach-one that better characterizes "obesity" and studies the specific profiles and characteristics of adipose tissue that lead to obese asthma.