Great, Now Fix It

5:03 pm EST March 17th, 2006 | Uncategorized | 2 Comments

Interesting information for folks (like me) who have asthma

Medical experts have been baffled by what causes asthma. Most of them favor the idea that it stems from “helper” cells that have gone awry. But researchers at Harvard Medical School (HMS) have come up with convincing evidence that the answer lies in a special type of natural “killer” cell.

“We were very, very surprised,” admits Dale Umetsu, a professor of pediatrics at the Medical School and at Harvard-affiliated Children’s Hospital in Boston. “People have been confused about which cells in the lungs are responsible for all these years. Now, we have to rethink the results of so many studies. Our new findings were totally unexpected.”

An estimated 17 million-20 million people in the United States suffer from asthma, and cases of it have been increasing since the early 1980s, according to the Asthma and Allergy Foundation of America. Every day, in this country, 30,000 people suffer an asthma attack, and 14 people die from the disease.

So, knowing exactly which cells should be targeted for treatment is a vital part of relieving a lot of misery for lots of people.

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2 Responses to “Great, Now Fix It”

  1. Frank_D says:
    March 17, 2006 at 5:03 pm

    Here’s something interesting:

    http://tinyurl.com/lqhf9

    Oh, yeah! I knew we had something in common…

    I got asthma in 91, two years after I quit smoking!

  2. bryan says:
    March 19, 2006 at 1:03 pm

    Frank, It can take up to 15 years to replace the tidal volume in your lung (that’s the amount of air that never leaves the lung).
    Did anyone see the finding that migraine sufferers tend to have a tiny hole between the top two chambers of their hearts? A procedure to block the hole is being tried and so far seems to be ridding sufferers of migraine attacks.