“The Next Breath We Take: Trailblazing New Treatments for Asthma” to be Presented as Part of NIH Clinical Center’s “Medicine for the Public” Series, Dec. 9

EPISODE #8
Uploaded:  November 20, 2008
Running Time:  3:56

SCHMALFELDT: From the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, this is CLINICAL CENTER RADIO.

Asthma is a common ailment affecting over 22 million Americans.  In fact, it is so common that one might be tempted to think that medical science has a handle on its treatment.  And while that is mostly true, a number of people suffer from a more severe form of asthma and do not get relief from the standard treatments that work on others.

LEVINE: For most patients who have moderate or mild disease, the treatments that are available are very effective, and most patients do extremely well.  It’s really only five or ten percent of patients who have severe disease that’s refractory to current therapy who are difficult to control.  Those patients need new treatment options and that’s what we’ll focus on in our talk and that’s also the focus of our research and other investigators’ research throughout the world.

SCHMALFELDT: That was Dr. Stewart J. Levine, chief of the Asthma and Lung Inflammation Section and acting chief of the Pulmonary and Vascular Medicine Branch at the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute at the NIH.  New treatments for severe asthma sufferers will be the topic of his “Medicine for the Public” presentation, December 9th at 7 pm at the Lipsett Ampitheater in the NIH Clinical Center.  Dr. Levine said his talk will center on the work being done at NIH and elsewhere to find new and better treatments for this disease that robs people of the very air they breathe.

LEVINE: I plan to cover two main points.  The first is just to give an overview about the pathogenesis of asthma – what are the symptoms, what causes asthma, what are the manifestations and what are the common treatments.  And then I’ll review some of the new therapies that are being investigated.  So first, we’ll review therapies that have been the topics of published clinical trials.  These are new approaches that have already been tested in patients and for which we have some data available that we can begin to use to make decisions as to whether these are approaches that might be helpful to patients with asthma.  And then after that, I’ll review some studies that we’re conducting here at the NIH regarding new treatment approaches for patients with asthma.

SCHMALFELDT: Dr. Levine discussed what he thinks folks who attend his lecture will learn from the presentation.

LEVINE: The main take-home message is that new treatments are needed for patients with asthma, especially those patients with severe disease, because those individuals really only have two treatment choices – that’s either high doses of inhaled steroids or oral steroids which have a lot of side effects even though they’re very efficacious, and anti-IgE therapy, which is an antibody therapy which requires parenteral administration, meaning it needs to be given by an injection, and it only works in a subset of patients.  So we think for patients with severe asthma, which represents five to ten percent of individuals with asthma who are poorly controlled with current medications, that we need new treatment options.  And we and other investigators in the field are working towards this goal.

SCHMALFELDT: “Medicine for the Public” is a series of lectures on disease-related topics by NIH scientists, sponsored by the NIH Clinical Center.  The lectures are free and open to the public. Since 1977, the series has provided the public with the latest information on medical research.  For more information, including info on all four “Medicine for the Public” presentations, log on to  http://clinicalcenter.nih.gov.  From America's Clinical Research Hospital, this has been Episode One of CLINICAL CENTER RADIO.  In Bethesda, Maryland, I'm Bill Schmalfeldt at the National Institutes of Health, an agency of the United States Department of Health and Human Services. 

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