Asthma can be a hard condition to control. In kids it can be much worse as, at the best of times it can be a struggle to get them to take their medicine and at the worst of times they’ll flat out lie and avoid taking it. They don’t want to be different from their friends at school and for the most part, we’re the same. Nobody wants to feel singled out, especially if they’re being singled out because they suffer from something not many other people suffer from. It’s also tricky to control because a lot of the standardised treatments aren’t as effective on some patients as they are on others, meaning that two patients can be taking the same set of therapies and in one the asthma will be stable and in the other there’ll be repeated hospitalisation.
The simple fact is that there aren’t nearly enough possible ways to treat asthma and in actual fact, asthma is such a relatively common condition people just assume it’s one fixes all. But of course, life is rarely so black and white and asthma is no different in this respect. One drug will have a dozen different effects depending on who’s receiving it and there are even studies which suggest that certain asthma drugs make certain asthmatics much worse than not taking the drug at all!
An advantage of asthma being so prevalent and well recognised is that a lot of money is put into researching it each and every year. This means that, though the advances may not be the fastest they do occur. One such advancement is the re-purposing of a drug used to treat chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) to treat asthma.
In a recent study tiotropium, which is traditionally used to treat COPD, was shown to improve bronchodialtion in asthmatics. This literally means that the tiny airways in the lungs dilated wider and an increased rate which makes it easier to breathe. Great news for asthmatics, even though the changes weren’t huge they showed promise! With time researchers may be able to target the drug more effectively and make it into a dully viable treatment for asthma!
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