Prof. Janet A Woolcock

I was introduced to Ann in Sydney in 1970 when I was briefly home on a visit. I was living in London at the time studying exercise-induced asthma in the Department of Paediatrics at the Brompton Hospital. Later Ann visited me at the Brompton and we spoke about her early research in lung volumes in asthmatics during an exacerbation. Her findings had influenced me to make the same measurements before and after exercise had provoked an acute attack of asthma.

Ann had received her Bachelor of Medicine degree from the University of Adelaide but the research for her MD degree was carried out at the University of Sydney and the Royal Prince Alfred Hospital (RPAH) with Professor John Read in the Department of Medicine in the mid 1960's. Ann had the opportunity to measure, by helium dilution, the lung volumes of patients hospitalised for asthma. She reported, for the first time, that the obstruction observed in the asthmatics was associated with marked lung hyperinflation with increases in total lung & functional residual capacities. She repeated the lung volume measurements over a number of days and reported resolution of the hyperinflation, after treatment but in the absence of changes in spirometry in some patients. (Woolcock AJ & Read J Lancet 1965;2:(7426):1323-5, & J Am J Med 1966;41(2):259-73). She also showed that this hyperinflation was associated with a loss of lung elastic recoil, another new finding. (Woolcock AJ & Read J Am Rev Respir Dis 1968;98(5)788-94).

After she had finished her MD she travelled to Montreal to work with Dr Peter Macklem at McGill University. She performed some important studies in animals, the end-result of which gave insight into the frequency dependence of compliance. (Woolcock AJ et al J Clin Invest 1969,48(6):1097-106).

In 1977 she wrote an important article on inhaled drugs in the preventions of asthma (Woolcock AJ Am Rev Respir Dis 1977;115(2):191-4). From her studies in New Guinea Ann had become interested in epidemiology particularly in the frequency of asthma in the community. I joined her study on the prevalence of bronchial hyperresponsiveness (BHR) in the Busselton cohort in 1981. This involved the inhalation of histamine in increasing doses from a hand-held nebuliser until the FEV₁ had fallen by 20%. This rapid method was very suitable to use for epidemiological studies and had been developed in Ann's lab in Sydney (Yan K, Salome C Woolcock AJ Thorax 1983;38(10):760-5) This method allowed a small group of us to investigate 916 subjects in just 14 days. (Woolcock AJ et al Thorax 1987; 42(5):361-8.)

An important contribution of Ann's was her identification of a plateau in the airway response of normal subjects to increasing doses of bronchoconstricting agents. The last study that we were both involved in was the inhibitory effect of inhaled cortico-steroid therapy treatment on the response to both to inhaled histamine and inhaled mannitol (Leuppi JD et al Am J Res Crit Care Med 2001;163:406-12).

Ann's contribution to respiratory medicine over 35 years was quite extraordinary – but then she was quite an extraordinary lady.