Emory Healthcare does not endorse or recommend any specific commercial product or service. So this Web site is provided solely for personal and private use of individuals accessing this information, and no part of it should be used for any other purpose. Dr Dickinson says that tests done on the British Olympic swimming team in the build up to Rio have shown that more than half of them have asthmatic symptoms. Eventually, there's a higher prevalence of exerciseinduced asthma in well trained elite individuals as they are training at a very high intensity. Surprisingly little was done to raise an alarm, even if the trends were unmistakable.
For a time, it was supposed that heightened awareness and better reporting were creating an artificial increase a statistical aberration and that rates would soon level off.
Only recently have researchers and public health officials, prompted in part by work done at the School and similar divisions at Hopkins, declared the obvious.
America is in the grip of an epidemic of asthma.
In the United States today, no chronic disease is increasing faster than asthma.
More than two decades into the epidemic, very little is known about what causes asthma or how it might be prevented. Still the numbers continue to rise. Now regarding the aforementioned fact... In her lab on the eighth floor of the Wolfe Street Building, Pam Lein, PhD, had been investigating the role of pesticides in the epidemic. Remember, a specialist in how environmental compounds affect nerve functions, Lein, an assistant professor in Environmental Health Sciences, is one of a team that has found evidence that certain pesticides may increase airway 'hyper reactivity', thereby initiating or aggravating an asthma attack.
When these pesticides are present you get a much greater reaction, what this means is if you administer a stimulus that normally causes constriction of the airway Lein says.
This suggests that the pesticide somehow alters the nerve function controlling the smooth muscle lining the airway.
It contracts, and restrains airflow, that is a hallmark feature of asthma. May be there are more yest to understand causes but these are important and proven. Then, pam Lein and her team found that certain pesticides can aggravate asthma attacks. Lein says that many people misunderstand the implications of her research, assuming that pesticide exposure is largely a huge problem unique to agricultural workers. With that said, not so, she says. It's awrite the show.
She asked for an ambulance and after that collapsed.
She never regained consciousness. For months after her funeral, recalls her father, Alonzo Griffin, an insurance executive, people will come up to me and they'd all say very similar thing. Nonetheless, I'm so sorry. Basically, I had no clue you could die from asthma.' Elauna Griffin It is the disease that failed to sound an alarm a disease that day afflicts more than 15 million people in the United States, about a third of whom are children. Starting in about 1980, the overall amount of asthma cases in the United States and globally began increasing steadily. Whenever as pointed out by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, between 1980 and 1994, the actual number of people with asthma in America rose by 75 percent. Now let me tell you something. Whenever increasing by 160 percent, and the overall amount of asthmarelated hospitalizations increased by 20 percent, among children under 4, asthma exploded. Basically, as new drugs and better treatment for asthma became available, perhaps most alarming of all the overall number of deaths from the disease did not decline but instead continued to increase defying the trend of declining rates of death from most other diseases and conditions, including such stubborn opponents as heart disease and even cancer.
2000 report, that grew out of the School's Pew Environmental Health Commission, was an unusually blunt document titled Attack Asthma.
Why America Needs a Public Health Defense System to Battle Environmental Threats.
While finding that less than 9 the planned percent $ 125 million expenditures on asthma research was to be spent on prevention, and less than 1 percent on the core public health activity of asthma tracking, the report cited the 1999 Health and Human Services budget. Lots of the money was to be spent on improving asthma treatment rather than preventing it from occurring above all. Faced with this type of a troubling increase, you should initiate an appropriate public health response, says Lynn Goldman, professor of Environmental Health Sciences, who was lead author for an influential 2000 report on asthma. Increasingly, it appears that it does. On p of a more complete understanding of how an asthma attack can turn fatal, fryer and her colleagues at the School are leading a couple of investigations into an exciting new avenue of asthma research that may result in new classes of drugs for treatment and control of the disease.
Imagine making an attempt to breathe in your personal air through a pinched straw.
That is exactly how many asthma sufferers describe an acute attack.
Medical literature describes asthma as an obstructive lung disease brought on by a heightened reaction of the airways to various stimuli, yet even today, the exact mechanism of an asthma attack isn't understood. Whenever causing a feeling of tightness, or the lining of the airways can become inflamed and swollen, resulting in wheezing and shortness of breath, muscles in the airways can constrict. While trapping air deep inside the lungs where That's a fact, it's rapidly depleted of oxygen, in extreme cases, like that of Elauna Griffin, airway muscles constrict. Unless the muscles are relaxed and fresh air brought into the lungs, the asthma sufferer can take only brief, shallow breaths insufficient to provide enough oxygen for the body and, can suffocate. In the last 20 years, asthma rates have soared to epidemic levels.
Since it can mean any irritant, william Spannhake tracks viruses in his laboratory to determine if they work with oxidant pollutants to worsen asthma attacks. The term environmental factors is itself potentially misleading, natural or 'manmade', that can cause or contribute to airway constriction in asthmatics.
As in Pam Lein's research, it can be pesticides or the ozone, particulate matter, and identical pollutants found in the smog throughout the Atlanta study.
It can be secondhand cigarette smoke, or naturally occurring allergens just like those associated with pets, pollen, mold, dust mites, and cockroaches. You see, in recent years, considerable attention had been given to bad air in tightly sealed modern buildings and homes that endlessly recirculate allergens and identical contaminants through forced air heating and cooling systems. Many of us are aware that there is other evidence that pollutants going to be at least partly to blame for the growing asthma epidemic. On p of this. Actually, throughout the 1996 Summer Olympic Games in Atlanta, city officials instituted draconian bans on automobile use in the downtown area to prevent gridlock. 24 hour a day public transportation system was put in place, and an additional 1000 buses were brought on line. Whenever as indicated by a study published last year in the Journal of the American Medical Association, the resultant 28 percent write in ozone concentrations throughout the Olympic Games was associated with a significant decline in asthma events, including a 41 percent write in Medicaid emergency care and hospitalizations, and a 44 percent decline in asthmarelated emergency care, urgent care, and hospitalizations.
One immediate way to decrease the burden of asthma, the article concludes, is to decrease ozone and particulate matter concentrations from automobile emissions.
It's said, nearly any problem looks like a nail, to a man with a hammer.
Allergist Peyton Eggleston can be forgiven for having a strong inclination to see a close association between asthma and allergy. Essentially, it's a relationship that ain't completely understood at this time, says Eggleston, a Pediatrics professor with a joint appointment in Environmental Health Sciences. Accordingly the pathology of asthma shows that eosinophils are the inflammatory cells in play during an asthma attack. Just keep reading! So it is different from the inflammation that results, say, from a burn, in which neutrophils are the inflammatory cells but quite similar eosinophils are found in the light red and swollen tissues typical of an acute allergic reaction. Says Eggleston, the pathology suggests a link. Of allergens and asthma, Peyton Eggleston says.
I am absolutely positive the link exists. Over the years, research conducted at the childhood asthma center that Eggleston directs, and at other centers, has shown that allergens like cockroach saliva and dust mite fecal particles can make asthma attacks more severe.
More recently, Eggleston and his team are conducting intervention studies to ascertain if the removal of allergens can improve asthma.
We're still in the proof stage of this, he says of his conviction that allergies play a key role in asthma. It is of the people who take care of patients, about half believe allergies are important. We still haven't sold everyone. Loads of us are aware that there is still a significant question and a need for research to test the hypothesis and come up with a consistent answer. Part of the challenge is the nature of the intervention research required. Also, compliance is a real issue in these studies, Eggleston notes. Basically, it should take plenty of effort on the families' parts. As example, he points to two studies currently under way at the Center. Fairly exacting standards of cleanliness must be consistently maintained, with few or no lapses, to reduce exposure to allergens. With all that said... Cats and dogs and identical allergen sources must be banished from the house, and researchers must pay frequent visits to ensure the rules are being obeyed. It's nearly impossible to convince people it's worth their time and effort, Eggleston says. He believes research at Hopkins and elsewhere is close to showing that controlling allergens could have been key to reducing asthma attacks.
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