In Britain, a new study found that many patients with asthma relied on drugs of quick mitigation for long time. But actually for some of them, using such drugs too frequently can cause the risk of aggravation of asthma symptoms.
Asthma drugs people usually take in nowadays can be simply divided into two broad categories, that is, preventive and palliative medicine. Preventive medicine can control the swelling and inflammation of the respiratory tract, but it is a long and slow process, requiring long-term to take the medicine regularly. And palliative medicine can irritate the airways to straighten out and is able to improve breathing conditions quickly; therefore many patients with asthma rely on palliatives for long time.
A few days ago, Professor Peter Bladen from University of Leicester and his research team members pressed statement that palliative medicine was not always as effective as people usually thought. Besides, sometimes frequent use of these drugs can even increase the extent of asthma symptoms.
The researchers said that one effect of the alleviative drug is to prevent mast cells of asthmatic patients’ lung to release histamine, which will cause narrowing of respiratory so that deleterious substances are increased in their bodies. But if there is an antibody called IgE existing in the patients’ bodies at the same time with chemical substances of stem cell factors, then alleviative drugs not only lose that capability, but also urge the mast cells to release more histamine.
The researchers also said that in the above procedure, Antibody IgE has a role in combination with the mast cells to promote mast cells to release histamine, while the stem cell factor is required necessarily for the mast cells’ survival and its working. As the mast cells cannot survive without the stem cell factor, so if you can suppress the function of stem cell factor, the mitigated effects of drugs would undoubtedly be enhanced. This may well be a new treatment of asthma.