What is Airway Remodeling?
- Tuesday, July 21, 2009, 21:55
- Asthma
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- Andrew:
- It’s important to look at the whole picture. And I know I’ve heard this term that you specialists use, “airway remodeling,” and let’s see if I get this right for our audience. That’s what you’re talking about, the damage, really permanent damage, to the lungs if the asthma is not controlled, permanent changes are made that would be difficult to correct.
- Dr. Gower:
- That’s correct. The process of inflammation, that is there if you have persistent asthma, is called remodeling. The NIH, the National Institute of Health, guidelines discuss and outline four types of asthma. One is intermittent asthma, which doesn’t have any significant inflammatory component and can just be treated occasionally, pre-exercise, etc. It does not lead, as far as we know, to permanent damage to the lungs. Then there’s persistent asthma, that is an inflammatory disease, and that needs to have a controlling kind of agent to decrease the inflammation, or therefore an anti-inflammatory agent. As Bev earlier discussed, her son had moderate persistent. There’s mild, moderate, and severe persistent, so depending on the extent of severity of your asthma, one chooses bigger guns, if you will, or more medicines to add on, tack on to the previous regimen, to decrease that inflammation and therefore decrease the remodeling.
And if you have remodeling that’s unchecked or inadequately treated, that leads to scarring of the lungs. That scarring in the lungs, like scarring on your skin when you scratch yourself or cut yourself, is impaired and does not function the way normal skin does, or in the case of the lungs, does not function the way a normal airway would and does not exchange oxygen and carbon dioxide. So you want to decrease that scarring and inflammation.
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