To participate, call 866-400-2472 or 866-400-AIR2
According to the American Lung Association, c lose to 20 million Americans currently have asthma. You probably know someone who suffers from this chronic disease. Asthma isn't always obvious; you can't always tell asthma sufferers by looking at them, but asthma is responsible for more than 14 million lost school days in children, two million emergency room visits and six thousand deaths every year.
UI Hospitals and Clinics is participating in an international investigational asthma treatment that may change the way doctors treat patients affected by asthma. Geoffrey McLennan, PhD, professor of internal medicine and biomedical engineering and co-principal investigator of the study at UI Hospitals and Clinics says asthma is the disease we recognize when someone develops sudden narrowing of their air tubes that take air in and out of the lungs.
"You can feel one of these air tubes in the front of your neck -- the trachea or main breathing tube that divides down in the chest into many smaller branches (like a tree). The asthma narrowing is usually in the smaller air tubes and is the result of muscle in the walls of the air tubes constricting or tightening up in an abnormal way. This leads to chest tightness, breathlessness and then wheezing," he says.
Currently, normal treatment for those with moderate or severe asthma is some form of inhaler therapy used every day. "Here there are two main types of drugs breathed into the lungs from the inhaler - a steroid type of drug that is a 'preventer' and a muscle dilating type of drug that is a 'treater' of the muscle constriction. These drugs are quite good, but need to be taken daily and may still not control the disease," McLennan says.
The new study is novel in that it aims to get rid of the muscle by gently heating up the muscle within the airway and partially destroying it McLennan says. "The reasoning is that without functioning smooth muscle there will be reduced muscle constriction, and therefore reduced airway narrowing. This is a pretty interesting notion, and represents the first non-drug therapy for asthma in many years.
"At the moment the expectation (from preliminary studies in humans) is that this heating therapy will help with symptom control, but will not cure asthma. However, the study is being undertaken to assess what the benefits might be, so we really do not know the outcome.
"We are actively recruiting patients for the study. The study is multi-center-with many centers around the world contributing -- both in the U.S. as well as Canada, Europe, South America, and Asia.
"Eligible patients are those with moderately severe asthma, with the need for regular daily medication. There are several eligibility criteria, as well as exclusion criteria, and those aspects can be evaluated by interested people calling 866-400-2472 or 866-400-AIR2. All costs for the study are covered by the study - this is of course an important aspect.
"Eligible participants will undertake the airway muscle heating process. This is performed through a bronchoscopy - putting a lighted flexible viewing tube into the lung, with the patient sedated, and then using the lighted tube to assist with applying heat to the airway wall.
"Care is taken with that, and we divide the treatment air tubes into three regions three bronchoscopies over several weeks to treat the entire airway tree. The subject also needs to keep a symptom diary, as well as having repeat measures of lung function, and quality of life.
"It is quite a busy study. The other information to add is that the study is what is called a randomized double blinded study -- so all eligible participants have the full study, but in some the heating method is not turned on. This enables the effect of the therapy to be specifically evaluated as against the general positive effects of being in research study. |
