Early Asthma Treatment Key to Healthy Lung Development
- Thursday, September 10, 2009, 12:29
- Asthma
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- Andrew:
- Now, we also understand now that early treatment for an individual is so important to prevent airway remodeling and other factors that could be life long. So, what are you recommending now to parents, let’s say, where there’s some indication of a respiratory problem that could be one type or another of asthma?
- Dr. Martinez:
- Most cases of asthma, both those that are related to allergies and those that are related to an alteration in the response to viral infections, usually start in the first years of life, but there’s a difference between the two forms. Those that are more related to allergies are more associated with alterations in the way the lungs grow. And thus, we are trying very hard now to identify those children that are at a higher risk of having this latter form, more than those that have a form associated with viral infection that will go away with time.
Both, of course, need to be treated in relation to the symptoms that occur at the time the doctor sees the child. But in the case of the one that is associated with more chronic symptoms, the atopy-related asthma, what we’re also trying to do is determining if by treating very early these forms we can prevent the alterations in the way that the lung grows that are associated with the disease.
- Andrew:
- Lifelong problems.
- Dr. Martinez:
- The lifelong problems. It’s a very important study, very, very recently published in the “New England Journal of Medicine,” saying that if you treat them aggressively, after the age of 6 it may be too late because even in children who were aggressively treated with anti-inflammatory agents, they improved in their symptoms, but their lung function still remained low. They couldn’t recover from the losses of lung function that probably had already occurred by the age of 6 years. So, it’s important to have the doctor identify what kind of asthma your child may have and to treat aggressively those children who have a family history of asthma, eczema, that may increase the likelihood of them having this chronic form of disease.
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