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Saturday 11 September 2010

Coughing For Life


There is now a good deal of work being done on causes and nature of lung problems around the world. Unluckily, precious little in the UK where research is governed by the funding requirements for “added value” in strictly commercial terms and added shareholder value related to the relevant companies.

This item is one I found interesting in that an implication is that there could be numbers of people from a young age who already very vulnerable to a wide range of possible causes of inflammation.

Quote from esciencenews dot com:

Research and insights on severe asthma in children

Published: Thursday, September 9, 2010 - 10:18 in Health & Medicine

A subset of children with asthma suffers from severe, treatment-resistant disease associated with more illness and greater allergic hypersensitivity, according to the results of the National Heart, Blood, and Lung Institute's Severe Asthma Research Program (SARP), presented in a recently published article in Pediatric Allergy, Immunology, and Pulmonology, a peer-reviewed journal published by Mary Ann Liebert, Inc. (www.liebertpub.com).

The article is available free online at www.liebertpub.com/pai Asthma is the most common chronic lung disease of children, with more than 6.6 million affected in the U.S. Although relatively few children have severe asthma, they account for almost half of asthma related expenditures.

SARP compared severe, therapy-resistant asthma in children and adults and identified age-specific characteristics of the disease. The results suggest that there are distinguishable clinical features of severe asthma that can be identified early in life.

Authors Anne Fitzpatrick, PhD from Emory University (Atlanta, GA) and William Gerald Teague, MD from the University of Virginia (Charlottesville) review the highlights of the SARP findings in an article entitled "Severe Asthma in Children: Insights from the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute's Severe Asthma Research Program".

They conclude that children with severe, therapy-resistant asthma are more likely to have poorer lung function and higher levels of allergic sensitization and to be of African American or mixed ancestry.

Their findings suggest that children as young as 6 years with severe asthma may already have structural airway changes.

"Identifying the features associated with severe, treatment-resistant asthma in children will allow us to better understand this illness and develop better treatments for these children who spend so much time struggling to breathe," says Harold Farber, MD, MSPH, Editor of Pediatric Allergy, Immunology, and Pulmonology, and Associate Professor of Pediatrics, Section of Pulmonology, Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, TX.

Source – Mary Liebhart, Genetic Engineering News
http://www.liebertpub.com/

Unquote.

This all adds to the picture of complexity and uncertainty in relation to the developing problems. The more pollution and contamination the more serious and widespread the problems become.

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