Clues as to Why Some Don’t Benefit From Asthma Treatment

Asthma is a chronic disease that affects the airways causing inflammation and breathing problems. Due to the inflammation the muscles surrounding the airways become swollen and restrict the smooth passage of air. Symptoms include coughing, wheezing, and breathing problems. While treating asthma doctors have found that almost half of the patients don’t respond to general treatments; the cause of this was unknown until recently a new study found out that these patients suffer from a different type of asthma and so they don’t respond to common treatments.

Normal asthma treatment consists of prescribing oral or inhaled corticosteroid medicines such as Aerobid, Azmacort, Flovent, and Symbicort. Corticosteroid helps fight the inflammation of the airways and relieve the muscles from their swollen state, thus resuming normal breathing. The corticosteroid medicines fight a condition medically termed as eosinophilic airway inflammation. Eosinophils are a type of white blood cells that cause inflammation of the airways and common asthma medicines are made to combat this inflammation. But people, who don’t respond to common treatments, when tested, showed that they did not have eosinophil in their sputum.

The study was carried on 1000 people suffering from asthma. They were enrolled in 9 clinical trials and were sponsored by the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute. Out of these people almost half of the patients (about 47%) did not report the presence of eosinophil in their sputum and these were the persons who did not respond to normal medications. The research also showed that thirty six percent of the patients who were taking anti-inflammatory inhaled corticosteroid had this condition and 17% of who were using inhaled steroids had the similar condition.

Subjects who suffered from eosinophilic airway inflammation type of asthma showed improvement in their condition after two weeks of anti-inflammatory and bronchodilator therapy. But those who did not test positive for eosinophil showed no improvements even after two weeks of treatment. According to Dr. John Fahy, director of the Airway Clinical Research Center at the University of California, San Francisco this study shows that asthma is not a one-type disease; there is a possibility that there are several sub-types yet to be known by the medical world.

The findings from this study suggests that quite a number of people do not respond to normal asthma treatments, in most cases the people who displayed similar behavior suffered from mild and moderate asthma, they were not severely affected by asthma. One thing that is clear from this study that new treatments need to be developed to combat asthma.