New Year’s Eve has always struck me as a wonderfully hopeful and neat, elegant way to bookend the holiday season. Sure it’s hard to let go of Christmas, but New Year’s helps. The ending and beginning that marks midnight means undecorating the tree and packing away my front-door wreath, only WITH A PARTY. Genius.
Also brilliant are the Best of the Year lists because I’m always discovering some new book or movie I missed in the past 12 months. Today, then, I’m listing my top 5 asthma stories of 2007. These are the articles I found enlightening, the ones that made me think or made me hopeful about the future of this disease.
1. New Research Centers to Investigate Disease and Pollution
This bit of news has to take my top slot even though it may not be the biggest story of the year, because I think it’s the one with the most potential to help my own Asthma Girl. The National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences is awarding $6.8 million to 3 new centers called DISCOVER, or Disease Investigation through Specialized Clinically-Oriented Ventures in Environmental Research.
I complain, quite often, that no one talks much about pollution and toxic air releases at the same time that they talk about asthma. These centers aren’t just going to have those conversations–they’re actually going to conduct research between the two. Two of the 3 centers are targeting asthma and air quality, and in a world increasingly warmer and dirtier, that’s very good news.
2. Scientists Find Childhood Asthma Gene
The ramifications of this, the biggest genetic breakthrough on asthma yet, are pretty huge in the long term. Because researchers found that children with higher levels of the ORMDL3 gene in their blood also can have a 60-70% higher risk of developing asthma, they’re getting closer to targeting how and where asthma originates. And that, in turn, means working on better meds to fight the disease at the source.
Since researchers identified the gene in kid’s blood cells, a blood test for asthma is a possibility for the future. Could you imagine? A simple pinprick or a vial or two of blood that results in a clear childhood asthma diagnosis? Sure beats all the back-and-forth, all the unnecessary oral meds, and all the misdiagnoses we encountered with the AG.
3. Antibiotic Use in Babies Increases Asthma Risk
Babies under the age of one should not take antibiotics for non-respiratory infections, the results of this Canadian study seem to suggest. Out of 13,116 children studied from birth to age 7, those who received antibiotics had double the risk of developing asthma.
It’s a small chip of paint in the overall asthma picture, but at the same time it helps point the finger at the problems that result from worldwide heavy use of antibiotics (see: superbugs, drug-resistant infections, etc. etc.).
4. Link Between PTSD and Asthma Found
For the first time, researchers have established a long-suspected connection between stress and asthma. This study linked post-traumatic stress disorder symptoms and asthma symptoms in Vietnam vets. While the actual specifics of the link–which is the cause and which the effect, or do they simply occur together for another, unknown reason?–are unclear, simply identifying the relationship exists is yet another small but tangible chip of paint. One day we’ll know which of these chips are most essential to the full image. Maybe all of them.
5. New NHLBI Asthma Guidelines
Finally, the National Heart Lung and Blood Institute issued new guidelines for asthma treatment last fall. Among the changes are an emphasis on better doctor/patient communication, expansion of asthma treatment from 4 to 6 steps, and new spirometry numbers.
A clear separation between childhood-onset and adult-onset asthma appears in the report for the first time, and so does the recommendation for ER and acute care docs to prescribe inhaled corticosteroids more often. If this initiative takes hold, I bet it would save some families years of problems.
That’s not an exaggeration.
My AG often flared severely at night, so the pediatrician during daytime appointments didn’t see the worst of her breathing problems. Asthma’s hidden quality complicated the ped. visits, the way it made the AG seem perfectly healthy in the doctor’s office if she wasn’t actively flaring. Kids like her might end up on essential maintenance plans sooner and get their asthma under control much faster if the emergency personnel that treated their first flares prescribed inhaler or nebulizer steroids.
There were plenty of other big stories in 2007, maybe some more meaningful to you than the ones I listed above:
The one about salmeterol and kids.
The one about he FDA funding crisis.
The one about menopause and asthma.
Which asthma stories/news/research made you think? None of these? All of them?
Great post.
Some of these links provide great hope for us asthmatics, while some I read with an open mind. For example, I read about peds and antibiotics about ten years ago, and I wondered if antibiotic use really caused asthma, or is it just a coincidence that the children who need antibiotics already have the bad gene and are susceptible to getting asthma anyway.
While gene therapy may not lead to a cure for asthma, it may be able to prevent future children from getting it. That would be a big step.
Anyway, cool post. Very informative. And happy new year. Keep up the good work.
Thanks! Good point about the antibiotics–I hadn’t considered that aspect of the research. I’m curious to see what this year brings.