Asthma can affect anyone; male or female, young or old. That’s what makes the disease such an issue for the health and wellbeing of the population. We don’t know exactly what causes asthma although we do know that there are some conditions that trigger it.
We also know some ways to treat the problem once it is in your system. But because it affects the lives of so many people, we are always looking for new ways to combat the disease. It’s good to know, then, that new research suggests that we might not be too far away from a brand new way of treating asthma – and one day it could even lead to a cure.
Based on a number of experiments using worms similar to those that infest millions of children, the researchers found that parasitic infections and asthma cause the human immune system to react in in the same way. Using this knowledge it might be possible to create a cure simply by manipulating some of the proteins that are involved in the immune system’s response.
To effectively combat a virus or disease, the immune system makes a decision to produce more chemicals in order to fight off the foreign bodies in your system. Our understanding of the immune system is improving all the time and this study is one of many into this fascinating area of science.
While the results for this test are early in the larger scheme of science, they do indicate that helping the body make more of a newly defined immune chemical may prevent worm infections, and that shutting it down may reduce lung damage in asthma.
Part of the immune system’s response to infections is to push out a large number of chemicals to see which is effective in fighting the problem. If the immune system could be manipulated to work through this process more quickly it could help people stave off asthma for good.
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