Researchers from Boston University School of Medicine (BUSM) have created a novel way to study COPD and could lead to new treatments and ways to monitor how those treatments affect patient wellness. This discovery has come as a result of a study published in the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine, in which the US researchers harvested airway cells using a minimally invasive procedure, helping them to identify a genetic signature for chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD).
When your wellbeing is affected by COPD, this means that you can experience coughing, wheezing, shortness of breath, chest tightness and other symptoms that make it difficult to breathe. The progressive lung disease leads to a loss of lung function, and is primarily caused by cigarette smoking. Treatments and lifestyle changes can help you cope with COPD, but as it stands there is not cure or effective therapy to reduce your rate of lung function decline.
Katrina Steiling, an assistant professor of medicine at BUSM who served as the study’s first author, explained, ‘There have been limited molecular studies of COPD given the inaccessibility and invasiveness of obtaining lung tissue.’ Therefore, the researchers worked on the hypothesis that COPD might be detectable in relatively accessible tissue throughout the respiratory tract, even though the disease primarily affects the tissue deep within your lungs.
The researchers obtained airway cells through a bronchoscopy, which is a procedure that involves putting a small camera into your airway through your nose or mouth, and using a cytology brush to gently scrape the sides of your airways to collect cells. 87 of the 238 samples collected from current and former smokers were from patients who had been diagnosed with mild to moderate COPD based on their lung function.
When the researchers compared the airway samples from the 87 COPD patients with the others, they found that 98 genes were expressed at different levels in those diagnosed with COPD. According to Avrum Spira, MD, Alexander Graham Bell professor of medicine, chief of the division of computational biomedicine at BUSM, a physician in the pulmonary, critical care and allergy department at Boston Medical Centre and one of the senior co-authors of the study, ‘Our data shows that there are consistent gene-expression changes that occur in both airway and lung tissue cells in individuals with COPD.’
She continued, ‘Studying COPD using the large airway opens up some really exciting new avenues of research that could also improve care for patients with COPD. While we are still at an early stage, I envision being able to examine airway cells from my patients with COPD to determine what is causing the disease and, from that information, recommend a more specific and effective treatment.’
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