Hope Like Never Before For Asthma Sufferers

A newly developed technique could very well help people with asthma have more comfortable lives and rely less on medication.

While bronchial thermoplasty is not meant (at least for now) to replace inhalers and drugs, it can greatly improve the quality of an asthma sufferer’s life, reducing the frequency of those much dreaded asthma attacks and making the inhaler somewhat less of a desperately needed accessory.

Volunteers who have taken part in a study of the technique say their lives have improved significantly, allowing them to be more active and less afraid of an inevitable impromptu asthma attack.

According to the World Health Organization, there are 300 million asthma sufferers worldwide. While the treatment needs further trials and would only be suitable for perhaps 10 per cent of them, the potential is great.

Professor Paul Corris of the University of Newcastle, one of the specialists involved, said: “The results have been very successful and this is a real breakthrough for the treatment of this widespread problem.

“The treatment is not a replacement for drugs or inhalers, it is in conjunction with these treatments. But the use of drugs and inhalers would be reduced as asthma attacks would become less common.”

The Canadian study has been published in the New England Journal of Medicine. It suggests the procedure, which is a pioneer – the first non-drug therapy for asthma – can significantly improve the lives of many patients with moderate to severe forms of the disease.

“It brings a whole new energy to (asthma research),” says the study's co-author, Dr. Gerard Cox, a respirologist at St. Joseph's Healthcare in Hamilton and head of McMaster University's department of respirology.

The study, aimed at adults for now, shows that people receiving the treatment have, on average, 80 to 90 more symptom-free days a year than those who take medications alone. They also experienced about 10 fewer severe attacks a year.

Asthma symptoms are caused when the airways contract. During severe attacks, patients can die from the disorder.

With the thermoplasty procedure, doctors insert a thin tube down the throat into the bronchial airways and insert a catheter that carries an array of four electrodes at its end. This is heated, which in turn warms the inner surface of the airways.

“We're not dealing with heat that's enough to burn. When we do a treatment we can hardly see any effect on the airway wall ... the effect is microscopic,” Cox says. The new technique is given under light sedation as an outpatient procedure taking around an hour.

Researchers don't know yet why it works. It is possible, they say, that the slightly increased temperatures have an effect on bronchial muscles, preventing them from contracting enough to create an asthma attack.

At this stage it is too early to say how long the effects of bronchial thermoplasty last, but Cox says animal experiments show the results may well be permanent. A bronchoscopy costs £300-£400 ($730-$970), and the treatment requires three.