Can asthma be cured?
1. There is much evidence that many asthmatics lose their symptoms for long periods and are in this sense 'cured'. 2. The factors leading to restitution of normally reactive healthy airways are multiple and only partially understood. 3. Attempts at cure are likely to require a multi-faceted approach where inducers and sensitizers of asthma are reduced as far as possible at the same time as stimulating biological factors whose function is to preserve normal patho-physiology of the airways. 4. Identification of these controlling factors requires intensive study using naturally occurring models of individuals who have and have not gone into remission. 5. Whether anti-asthma medication will help usefully in redressing the balance or whether by inhibiting the stimulus for the production of inherent biological controlling factors, they actually mitigate against persisting remission (i.e. 'cure') needs urgent study. Such a possibility might account for some of the remarkable inconsistencies in epidemiological studies currently being reported. In particular, while medications for the control of asthma have improved dramatically over the last twenty years, the prevalence and perhaps mortality rates from asthma are actually rising. However until evidence is much firmer, the dangers of undertreating asthma must be recognized.
Turner-Warwick
M
M
Royal College of Physicians, London.
D001249:Asthma / Q000209:etiology / Q000503:physiopathology / Q000628:therapy*; D006801:Humans; D008954:Models, Biological; D012075:Remission, Spontaneous