Hospitals in Manchester and Glasgow in the UK have started treating asthma patients with a pioneering new non-drug treatment for asthma that uses radio waves to burn away muscle tissue blocking the airways in the lungs.
Patients with asthma typically have thicker smooth muscle in the walls of airways in their lungs, which increases the probability that when exposed to dust, allergens, and other stimuli, the airways will constrict and cause an asthma attack.
Although for many patients, treatments based on drugs are fairly successful at controlling the inflammation and contraction of airway smooth muscle, they don’t work so well for some patients with severe and persistent asthma.
The new technique is called bronchial thermoplasty, a minimally invasive procedure where a specially trained physician inserts a bronchoscope (a long flexible tube with a camera on the end) into the lung via the moderately sedated patient’s nose or mouth.
The physician “navigates” the bronchoscope to the target treatment site, and then pushes a small catheter that looks like a tiny egg beater through the end of the tube.
Using the catheter, the physician then delivers a temperature-controlled, low-power radio frequency burst of energy for a few seconds at each target site. The energy heats up the walls of the target airway site and burns away some of the thickened muscle.
Manchester Evening News reports that last week, a middle-aged woman became the first patient in England to receive the treatment, which she underwent at the University Hospital of South Manchester in Wythenshawe.
The procedure took less than an hour and the patient is now at home recovering.
Dr Rob Niven, a consultant chest physician who is also a Senior Lecturer in Respiratory Medicine at the University of Manchester School of Medicine, led the team that carried out the operation.
Niven told the press that:
“Bronchial thermoplasty is the first non-drug treatment for asthma, and it may be a new option for patients with severe asthma who have symptoms despite use of drug therapies.”
The treatment may not suit every asthma patient and is not intended for children.
He said the operation went as planned and the patient is responding well. They hope to see her condition improve significantly in the next few months.
Following this initial success, the hospital is expected to carry out further operations in the coming months. Another hospital in Glasgow also operated on a patient last week, and other UK hospitals are expected to follow.
During a year long trial global trial, asthma patients treated with bronchial thermoplasty experienced fewer asthma attacks, more days without symptoms, a reduction in inhaler use and a general improvement in quality of life.
Patients in the United Stated started receiving the treatment some months ago.
Asthma is a common disease that causes inflammation and tightness in the airways in the lungs (bronchoconstriction), making it very difficult to breathe.
An estimated 300 million people worldwide are living with asthma, 5.2m of them in Britain, where it causes 70,000 hospital admissions and kills 1,400 people a year.
Sources: Manchester Evening News, BBC, Asthma UK, btforasthma.com.
Written by: Catharine Paddock, PhD