Until recently it’s been a bit of a mystery as to why exactly the obese were so prone to contracting asthma as well. There’s no immediate and obvious link. You can see why obesity would affect the health of your heart and you can probably make the leap and work out why an overweight person might suffer from respiratory problem but asthma is very specific. It’s a condition which is caused when outside stimuli creates an inflammatory response in the airways and those airways can swell shut and cut off a patients breathing.
A link was made about two decades ago between leptin levels and obesity. It appeared that mice with a leptin deficiency overate and became overweight very quickly, this finding didn’t directly correlate to human beings but what was found when scientists looked at leptin levels in obese humans was interesting. They were much higher and it became apparent that the larger a person got, the more leptin their body produced and the more resistant they became to it.
What’s this got to do with asthma? Well, it was recently discovered that one of the many things that the hormone leptin controls is the contraction of our airways. Without the leptin acting as it should have and helping to regulate them, our airways are much more susceptible to damage from outside influences such as the allergens which can set off asthma in the first place.
Scientists have been working on a treatment using this exact idea. A therapy which increases the signalling of leptin already in the body, making the hormone much more potent, will increase its effectiveness. In recent studies this has been shown to greatly improve the wellness of obese asthmatics and in some cases, their asthma has gone into total remission.
These studies are fairly recent and as such it may be a while before we see similar treatments on the market but it’s clearly only a matter of time!
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