Discovery of the mechanism behind asthma may help find an effective treatment for it

A team of scientists describes the cell death that occurs in the respiratory tract and explains the symptoms of the disease

The word asthma comes from Greek, and one of the first references in literature alluded to the shortness of breath that the heroes of the Iliadsuffered after fighting. A few millennia later, the cause of asthma attacks — a sudden closure of the airways that can be fatal — is far from clear.

A study published on Thursday in the journal Science has just revealed a new cause of asthma attacks and suggests a path towards new treatments that could not only alleviate the symptoms, but also prevent the serious damage they can cause to the health of the people who suffer from it.

Until now, it was thought that asthma was a disease of the immune system against an internal, genetic or external agents, such as pollen or pollution. This immune reaction produced suffocation, inflammation of the respiratory tract, mucus, cough and the rest of the symptoms that characterize the disease. Current treatments are based on this idea and are aimed at opening inflamed airways with inhalers that dilate the bronchi, but do not attack the underlying cause of the disease.

The new work, led by researchers in the United Kingdom and the United States, explores the sudden contraction of the airways, especially their branches within the lungs, the bronchi. The team has analyzed this compression at the cellular level in the lungs of mice suffering from asthma and in respiratory tissue of patients. The results describe a phenomenon known as extrusion, which appears to be to blame for all of asthma’s subsequent airway effects. “Bronchoconstriction results in pathological overcrowding of cells in the airway epithelium, squeezing out (extruding) epithelial cells and thus damaging the epithelial layer enough to trigger inflammation,” says the study.