Understand and manage your asthma better with themedguru brief on the latest findings on the disease.
What is Asthma?
Asthma is a chronic disease that affects your airways. Having asthma means that the inside walls of your airways become sore, swollen and very sensitive. When your airways react, they get narrower and your lungs get less air. This can cause wheezing, coughing, chest tightness and trouble breathing. In a severe asthma attack, the airways can close so much that your vital organs do not get enough oxygen.
A New Paradoxical Approach to Asthma Treatment
Just when the Food and Drug Administration is reconsidering the use of stimulants to treat asthma, a new research study offers further evidence to support a University of Houston professor's theory that an opposite approach to asthma treatment may be in order. This approach, termed paradoxical pharmacology, suggests patients may be treated with medication that initially worsens their symptoms before eventually improving their overall health.
Richard A. Bond, professor of pharmacology at the University of Houston College of Pharmacy, has been investigating whether beta-2 adrenoreceptor antagonist drugs (or beta blockers) ultimately might be a safer, more effective strategy for long-term asthma management than the currently used beta-2 adrenoreceptor agonists (or stimulants).
The beta-2 adrenoreceptor is a receptor found in many cells, including the smooth muscle lining the airways, and has long been a target for asthma drugs. Bond and his colleagues propose an alternative to stimulants, using antagonists (or beta blockers) instead.
Vitamin D Levels Linked to Asthma Severity
New research provides evidence for a link between vitamin D insufficiency and asthma severity. Serum levels of vitamin D in more than 600 Costa Rican children were inversely linked to several indicators of allergy and asthma severity, including hospitalizations for asthma, use of inhaled steroids and total IgE levels, according to a study.
While previous in vitro studies have suggested that vitamin D may affect how airway cells respond to treatment with inhaled steroids, this is the first in vivo study of vitamin D and disease severity in children with asthma.
Juan Celedón, M.D., Dr. P.H. and Augusto Litonjua, M.D., M.P.H. of Harvard Medical School, and colleagues recruited 616 children with asthma living in the Central Valley of Costa Rica, a country known to have a high prevalence of asthma They found that children with lower vitamin D levels were significantly more likely to have been hospitalized for asthma in the previous year, tended to have airways with increased hyper reactivity, and were likely to have used more inhaled corticosteroids, all signifying higher asthma severity.
A complication is that vitamin D, unlike most other nutrients, is primarily synthesized in the body in response to sun exposure rather than consumed.
Broccoli may help in curbing asthma
All asthma patients, eat your broccoli. UCLA researchers report that a naturally occurring compound found in broccoli and other cruciferous vegetables may help protect against respiratory inflammation that causes conditions like asthma, allergic rhinitis and chronic obstructive pulmonary
disease.
The research shows that sulforaphane, a chemical in broccoli, triggers an increase of antioxidant enzymes in the human airway that offers protection against the onslaught of free radicals that we breathe in every day in polluted air, pollen, diesel exhaust and tobacco smoke.
"This is one of the first studies showing that broccoli sprouts — a readily available food source — offered potent biologic effects in stimulating an antioxidant response in humans," said Dr. Marc Riedl, the study's principal investigator and an assistant professor of clinical immunology and allergy at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA.
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