Not All Asthma Created Equal
4,000 Asthma Deaths
About 4,000 people in the United States die each year from asthma, and half a million are hospitalized, according to the latest figures from the CDC.
The 5% to 10% of patients with the most severe disease account for a disproportionate number of deaths and the bulk of asthma-related costs to the health care system, Wake Forest University asthma researcher Wendy C. Moore, MD, tells KB120.
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Along with Wake Forest colleagues, Moore is studying the genetic differences between asthma patients through a SARP grant.
Other SARP researchers are examining the impact of latent viral infection and systemic inflammation on asthma.
"The overall goal is to understand the disease better so that we may be able to target treatments to individual patients," she says.
Asthma and allergy specialist John Sweet, MD, tells KB120 that there are promising new therapies for patients with severe, hard-to-treat asthma, including immunosuppression aimed at calming the immune system responses that lead to asthma, and anti-IgE, which targets allergic response.
Sweet agrees that a better understanding of the differences between asthma patients could lead to better treatments.
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