Every hour, 12 Canadians are diagnosed with asthma. Most people are able to manage their symptoms and live healthy, active lives. However, for some, current treatments are not effective. Managing symptoms can be difficult because triggers are lurking everywhere.
Every hour, 12 Canadians are diagnosed with asthma. Most people are able to manage their symptoms and live healthy, active lives. However, for some, current treatments are not effective. Managing symptoms can be difficult because triggers are lurking everywhere.
“At one point, the doctor requested that we remove all the carpets from our home. Dust mites can trigger an attack. I’ve had to leave restaurants in the middle of a meal because someone’s perfume is too strong. Scents and pollen can trigger an attack. Sometimes I feel like I can’t leave my house,” says Carolyn, a Calgary woman who has been living with asthma for more than 20 years. “When I do have an attack, I feel like someone is sitting on my chest, and I’m trying to breathe around the weight. It’s horrible, my whole body can start to shake and I can feel my lungs filling with mucus.”
In asthmatics, the lining of the airways becomes inflamed and swollen. During an asthma attack, air passages in the lungs narrow and mucus production increases. To open the airways, asthmatics inhale medication to relax the airways and reduce lung inflammation — a difficult task when you are struggling to take a breath, and not always effective. Asthma attacks result in more than 70,000 emergency room visits and 250 deaths in Canada each year.
University of Calgary scientists with the Alberta Children’s Hospital Research Institute and Hotchkiss Brain Institute at the Cumming School of Medicine have discovered another way to help asthmatics breathe more easily by targeting treatment at the nervous system. A recent study performed on rats shows the carotid bodies, tiny collections of neurons on each side of the neck, may be responsible for causing lung airway narrowing during an allergen-induced asthma attack.
Read more at University of Calgary
Image: University of Calgary researchers Nick Jendzjowsky, left, first author on the study, and Richard Wilson describe the results of the study as 'immediate and dramatic.' (Credit: Photos by Riley Brandt, University of Calgary)
