Asthma

===== Symptoms ===== ===== Management ===== ===== Other treatments ===== ===== Tests ===== ===== Diagnosis ===== ===== Epidemiology ===== ===== Types ===== ===== Evidence of infectious cause===== ===== Role of vitamin D metabolism ===== ===== Politics ===== ===== Patient interviews ===== ===== Presentations and publications=====

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  • http://www.marshallprotocol.com/forum37/9317.html s337

Asthma, asthma medications linked to prostate cancer risk By MedWire Reporters 09 August 2010 Cancer Epidemiol Biomarkers Prev 2010; Advance online publication MedWire News: Men with asthma and those who have used asthma medications, particularly systemic glucocorticoids, are at increased risk for developing prostate cancer, results from an Australian study suggest.

Gianluca Severi, from The University of Melbourne in Victoria, and colleagues explain that “although a local inflammatory process in the respiratory system is unlikely to affect the behavior of the cells in the prostate per se, it might be an indicator of a general propensity of the immune system to overreact to antigens.”

They add that chronic or excessive immune stimulation can lead to malignant transformations.

The team used data for 16,934 men from the Melbourne Collaborative Cohort Study to investigate whether a history of asthma or the use of asthma medications is associated with prostate cancer risk.

A total of 1179 participants were diagnosed with prostate cancer during an average follow-up period of 13.4 years, with 11% of the whole cohort reporting a history of physician-diagnosed asthma at baseline.

Two-thirds (67%) of the asthmatic men reported using medication to control their asthma including antihistamines, bronchodilators, inhaled glucocorticoids, and systemic glucocorticoids.

Overall, a history of asthma was associated with a small but significant 1.25-fold increased risk for prostate cancer, and the risk for men who used medications was statistically similar to those who did not use medications, at a respective 1.29- versus 1.12-fold increased risk.

Hazard ratios (HRs) for the risk for prostate cancer by type of asthma medication were: 1.71 for systemic glucocorticoids, 1.39 for inhaled glucocorticoids, 1.36 for bronchodilators, and 0.78 for antihistamines. After adjusting the results for the presence of asthma, the HRs changed only slightly, at 1.30, 1.64, 1.29, and 0.76, respectively, for each medication group.

In light of the higher risks observed among men who took medications for asthma versus those who did not, Severi and co-authors suggest that more severe asthma and inflammation could be more strongly associated with prostate cancer than mild asthma.

However, they concede that it is difficult to disentangle the effects of asthma itself with the effects of medication.

“Further studies are needed to clarify the possible mechanisms underlying these associations,” concludes the team.

Should be in the allergies article too?

Biomed Pharmacother. 2007 Jan;61(1):21-8. Epub 2006 Dec 5.

Antimicrobial strategies: an option to treat allergy?

Papadopoulos NG, Konstantinou GN. Allergy Research Centre, 2nd Pediatric Clinic, University of Athens, Athens, Greece. ngp@allergy.gr Abstract Respiratory infections by bacteria and viruses often trigger symptoms of asthma in both adults and children. This observation and subsequent mechanistic studies have demonstrated important interactions among allergens, microbes and the atopic host. The mechanisms responsible for microbe-induced asthma exacerbations are only incompletely understood. A focal point of current research is the inflammatory response of the host following an encounter with a pathogenic microbe, including variations in chemokine and cytokine production and resulting in changes in bronchial hyper-responsiveness and lung function. Direct bronchial infection, exposure of nerves with resulting neurogenic inflammation and a deviated host immune response are among the mechanisms underlying these functional disorders. Lately, suboptimal innate immune responses, expressed as defective interferon production, have gained attention as they might be amenable to intervention. This review describes the suggested mechanisms involved in the complex interactions between 'asthmagenic' microbes, the immune system and atopy, based on in-vitro and in-vivo experimental models and epidemiological evidence. In addition, it provides a synopsis of potential therapeutic strategies either directly against the microorganisms or in respect to the associated inflammation. PMID: 17188832

Our Body the Ecosystem: Understanding the Interplay Between Man and Microbe

http://tiny.cc/tthld

“In the last three decades, all of these allergic disorders—asthma, eczema, hay fever—they’ve all tripled,” Segre says. With that short of a time frame, the culprit can’t be simply changes in our own genome. “So it must be something about the gene-environment interaction. And I now believe that that’s modulated by the body’s bacteria.”

Segre doesn’t know whether bacteria associated with eczema are the cause of the disease or simply a consequence of living with it. To find out, she plans to perform a metagenomic analysis of the samples. During a metagenomic analysis, scientists compare thousands of genes present in a particular species’s DNA. By looking at the biological function of the genes—what kinds of proteins they make and what kinds of biological pathways those proteins are involved in—the scientists can make educated guesses about the role of each species, and how different species may work with one another and with our own genome.

“We all believe there’s an interdependency among these organisms. They’re highly dependent on their neighbors for their survival,” says Claire Fraser-Liggett, director of the Institute for Genome Sciences at the University of Maryland. Metagenomics, however, is immensely complicated. Researchers know little about how the millions of microbial genes might work together, and it’s difficult to sort out which patterns are signatures of disease versus part of normal variation between people. “There’s no way to overemphasize the analytical challenges,” Fraser-Liggett says. “It’s something that everybody is struggling with.”

J Allergy Clin Immunol. 2011 Feb;127(2):372-381.e3. Epub 2010 Dec 30. Airway microbiota and bronchial hyperresponsiveness in patients with suboptimally controlled asthma.

Huang YJ, Nelson CE, Brodie EL, Desantis TZ, Baek MS, Liu J, Woyke T, Allgaier M, Bristow J, Wiener-Kronish JP, Sutherland ER, King TS, Icitovic N, Martin RJ, Calhoun WJ, Castro M, Denlinger LC, Dimango E, Kraft M, Peters SP, Wasserman SI, Wechsler ME, Boushey HA, Lynch SV; National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute's Asthma Clinical Research Network.

Division of Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine, Department of Medicine, University of California, San Francisco, Calif.

Abstract

BACKGROUND: Improvement in lung function after macrolide antibiotic therapy has been attributed to reduction in bronchial infection by specific bacteria. However, the airway might be populated by a more diverse microbiota, and clinical features of asthma might be associated with characteristics of the airway microbiota present.

OBJECTIVE: We sought to determine whether relationships exist between the composition of the airway bacterial microbiota and clinical features of asthma using culture-independent tools capable of detecting the presence and relative abundance of most known bacteria.

METHODS: In this pilot study bronchial epithelial brushings were collected from 65 adults with suboptimally controlled asthma participating in a multicenter study of the effects of clarithromycin on asthma control and 10 healthy control subjects. A combination of high-density 16S ribosomal RNA microarray and parallel clone library-sequencing analysis was used to profile the microbiota and examine relationships with clinical measurements.

RESULTS: Compared with control subjects, 16S ribosomal RNA amplicon concentrations (a proxy for bacterial burden) and bacterial diversity were significantly higher among asthmatic patients. In multivariate analyses airway microbiota composition and diversity were significantly correlated with bronchial hyperresponsiveness. Specifically, the relative abundance of particular phylotypes, including members of the Comamonadaceae, Sphingomonadaceae, Oxalobacteraceae, and other bacterial families were highly correlated with the degree of bronchial hyperresponsiveness. Conclusion: The composition of bronchial airway microbiota is associated with the degree of bronchial hyperresponsiveness among patients with suboptimally controlled asthma. These findings support the need for further functional studies to examine the potential contribution of members of the airway microbiota in asthma pathogenesis.

Copyright © 2010 American Academy of Allergy, Asthma & Immunology. Published by Mosby, Inc. All rights reserved. PMID: 21194740

Asthma Tied to Bacterial Communities in the Airway Using new detection methods, researchers learned that the diversity of microbes inside the respiratory tract is far vaster than previously suspected – creating a complex and inter-connected microbial neighborhood that appears to be associated with asthma, and akin to what has also been found in inflammatory bowel disease, vaginitis, periodontitis, and possibly even obesity.

http://tinyurl.com/4dj2bsn

Best, Frans

From: BaneDate: 2011-02-18 01:04:36 Reply: http://www.marshallprotocol.com/reply.php?topic_id=13716

Asthma tied to bacterial communities in the airway

http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-02-asthma-tied-bacterial-airway.html

Using new detection methods, researchers learned that the diversity of microbes inside the respiratory tract is far vaster than previously suspected – creating a complex and inter-connected microbial neighborhood that appears to be associated with asthma, and akin to what has also been found in inflammatory bowel disease, vaginitis, periodontitis, and possibly even obesity.

Contrary to popular belief, the scientists also learned that the airways are not necessarily entirely sterile environments, even in healthy people, while the airways of asthmatics are infected by a richer, more complex collection of bacteria. These findings could improve understanding of the biology of asthma, and potentially lead to new and much-needed therapies.

“People thought that asthma was caused by inhalation of allergens but this study shows that it may be more complicated than that – asthma may involve colonization of the airways by multiple bacteria, said study co-author Homer Boushey, MD, a UCSF professor of medicine in the division of Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine. The study is published online in the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology. Asthma is one of the most common diseases in the world, with approximately 300 million asthmatics globally, including 24 million in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control. The disease has been on the rise for the last 60 years. “It has gone from 3 percent of the population to slightly more than 8 percent of the population in the U.S., said Boushey. “It is most prevalent in western, developed nations – and we don't know why. In recent years, scientists began studying communities of mixed-species microorganisms (microbiome) found in both diseased and healthy people to better understand their role in a variety of diseases. But research on the microbiome in respiratory disease is relatively uncharted terrain. “We know fairly little about the diversity, complexity and collective function of bacteria living in the respiratory tract, and how they might contribute to diseases like asthma, said Yvonne J. Huang, MD, the paper's first author. She is a research fellow and clinical instructor in the UCSF Pulmonary Division.

“Traditionally, the airways have been thought to be sterile. However, this study suggests this is not the case. Certain asthma patients who require inhaled corticosteroid therapy possess a great abundance of bacteria compared to healthy individuals, and have an increased relative abundance of specific organisms that is correlated with greater sensitivity of their airways. In their three-year pilot project, the scientists collected samples from the airway linings of 65 adults with mild to moderate asthma and 10 healthy subjects. Then, using a tool that can identify approximately 8,500 distinct groups of bacteria in a single assay, the scientists profiled the organisms present in each sample to look for relationships between bacterial community composition and clinical characteristics of the patients' asthma. The researchers found that bronchial airway samples from asthmatic patients contained far more bacteria than samples from healthy patients. The scientists also found greater bacterial diversity in the asthmatic patients who had the most hyper-responsive or sensitive airways (a feature of asthma). “People have viewed asthma as a misdirected immune reaction to environmental exposures, but few have thought of it in the context of airway microbiota composition, said senior author Susan Lynch, PhD, an assistant professor of medicine and director of the UCSF Colitis and Crohn's Disease Microbiome Research Core in the division of gastroenterology.

“We took an ecological approach, considering the bacteria in the context of their microbial neighborhoods to identify relationships between characteristics of these communities and features of the disease…This new approach will help us to better understand the microbiota-host relationships that define human health.''

The authors say that further studies are needed to determine how these specific bacteria identified in the study may influence the cause and development of asthma.