Asthma Treatment News
New Asthma Treatment Makes Breathing Easier
A new treatment called Bronchial Thermoplasty could help people with severe asthma breathe easier.
The process involved doctors putting a tiny catheter down breathing tubes to melt away the smooth muscle that can tighten during an asthma attack.
By increasing airflow, patients can respond better to inhalers and oral medications. Doctors warn that this in not a cure for asthma.
The treatment is only for people whose attacks are so severe, they make regular visits to the ER and use rescue inhalers constantly.
The procedure takes three outpatient treatments that last about 30 minutes each.
New Treatment Helps Asthmatics Breathe Easier
About 22 million Americans have asthma. Most are able to control it with medication, but about15-percent of asthma patients have cases so severe they require frequent trips to the hospital. Now there’s a new treatment to help those people breathe easier.
Tony Cook runs 6 to 7 miles a day. But until recently, his severe asthma made it too painful for him to work out for any length of time.
“It feels like a coil is just tightening around your lungs and you can’t get any relief whatsoever,” explained Cook.
In May, Tony underwent a new FDA approved treatment called bronchial thermoplasty. Doctors put a tiny catheter down his breathing tubes to melt away the smooth muscle that can tighten during an asthma attack. By increasing airflow, patients can respond better to inhalers and oral medications.
“We’re not curing asthma with this therapy. These patients will still have a diagnosis of asthma. What we’re hoping to do is bring them down a notch,” explained Dr. David Duhamel, Director of Pulmonary Procedures at Virginia Hospital.
Bronchial thermoplasty isn’t for people with mild or moderate asthma. It’s for people whose attacks are so severe that they make regular visits to the emergency room and need to use rescue inhalers constantly .
Bronchial thermoplasty takes three outpatient treatments that last about a half hour each.
“Right after the procedure I felt that coil loosen. To me, it was amazing,” said Cook.
Tony felt better immediately, but typically, the patients’ asthma gets worse the first few days after treatment then improves.
“I’m not coughing I’m not wheezing. It’s just the quality of life that I’ve always dreamed of having,” said Tony.
Because it’s so new, Tony’s procedure wasn’t covered by his insurance, but patients should check with their own carriers.
The FDA is requiring asthmatx, the company behind bronchial thermoplasty, to conduct a five-year study to determine the long-term effects of the treatment.
Inhaled steroids don’t help asthma flare-ups
(Reuters Health) – Doubling the dose of inhaled steroids doesn’t appear to dampen asthma attacks, despite the practice being recommended by many doctors, Canadian researchers said Thursday.
More than seven percent of adult Americans, and even more kids, have asthma, causing millions of visits to emergency rooms and doctors’ offices every year.
Until recently, national guidelines advised people to double the dose of inhaled steroids when they felt the telltale signs of an asthma flare-up coming on, such as chest tightness and coughing.
Those steroid medications, such as Pulmicort or Flovent, keep airway inflammation under control on a daily basis in asthmatics. So doctors had reasoned higher doses might work in emergencies.
“It is a reasonable thing to try,” said Dr. Andy Nish, an asthma expert at the Allergy and Asthma Care Center in Gainesville, Georgia, who was not involved in the new study, published by The Cochrane Collaboration.
“This article shows that sometimes we do things that seem reasonable and yet maybe aren’t as effective as we would like to think.”
The Canadian researchers pooled the best data available on outcomes with the higher doses, including five clinical trials that assigned 1,250 patients randomly to take either the standard dose of inhaled steroids or an increased dose.
Kamagra sildenafil citrate tablets
Overall, doubling or even quadrupling the amount of inhalant at the onset of a flare-up didn’t make patients any less likely to need rescue treatment with swallowed or injected steroids such as prednisone.
While effective, those stronger treatments may cause serious side effects like depression or bone thinning, so patients and doctors prefer to limit their use.
Except for 28 patients, all study participants were adults, so the findings may not apply to children.
“The most important strategy to reduce the rate and severity of flare-ups is to take daily preventive medications for asthma,” Dr. Francine M. Ducharme, who worked on the study, said in an e-mail to Reuters Health.
Ducharme, of the University of Montreal, said it was still common for doctors to recommend high-dose inhaled steroids to stave off attacks.
Instead, she said, patients should try rescue inhalers, which contain short-acting drugs such as albuterol that open up the airways. If that doesn’t work, swallowed or injected steroids may be necessary.
Nish said the best thing to do is try to prevent flare-ups. “Avoid cigarette smoke, stay indoors if it is a high-smog day, avoid exertion if it’s a cold or a hot day, and get your flu shot.”
And with the right medication, he said, many asthma attacks can be prevented.
“We can’t keep you from getting a cold, but hopefully we can keep that cold from causing significant exacerbations in your asthma,” he said.