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| New Emphysema Treatment |
Question:
Are there any new treatments for emphysema on the horizon?
Answer:
There is some new research that may point to a treatment that may cure or greatly reduce emphysema.
For decades researchers have speculated that it is the body's own
chemicals, mustered to defend against irritants, that bring on the
inflammation and lung-cell destruction of emphysema, a disease that
eventually develops in many people who smoke.
Now scientists at Washington University in St. Louis have proved this to
be true in mice. And because lung function in mice is so similar to that
in people, they say, the finding may point to a way to prevent the
disease.
Emphysema results when an irritant causes inflammation and stretching of
the air sac cells in the lung; ultimately the cells collapse completely.
Thirty-five years ago scientific papers began showing that one body
chemical, the elastase that is made by cells called neutrophils, can
attack and destroy elastin. But this chemical is now believed to cause
only a tiny amount of lung damage.
The study suggests that what happens in the development of emphysema is
that the body responds to the constant irritant of smoking with a gross
overreaction: It sends armies of macrophages to the site of the
irritation in the lungs, and those macrophages make large amounts of the
elastase chemicals.
Snider, the chief of medicine at the veterans' hospital in Boston, said
the study should give some hope, but cautioned that it would be five
years or more before it was clear whether the discovery would lead to a
useful treatment for emphysema.
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