(Press-News.org) Sufferers of smoking related lung diseases could have their debilitating symptoms reduced following the discovery of a potential new treatment.
The discovery, by researchers at the University of Melbourne, Royal Melbourne Hospital, Australia, and the Brigham and Women's Hospital, Harvard Medical School, US, could dramatically improve treatments and slow the progression of COPD (Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease) which includes the incurable condition emphysema.
COPD is a progressive disease that makes it hard to breathe and is mostly caused by excessive smoking. Approximately 2.1 million Australians have some form of COPD. By 2050, this figure is expected to more than double to 4.5 million.
The international team identified that the protein SAA plays a key role in chronic inflammation and lung damage in COPD and also inhibits the natural effort of the lung to repair itself after smoking has stopped.
The findings have been published in the prestigious scientific journal, the Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences.
Professor Gary Anderson from the University of Melbourne said the discovery could become a dual treatment to improve lung function at any stage of COPD.
"It has the potential to dramatically improve the lives of many people suffering these conditions and reduce the huge burden of health and hospital costs associated with their treatment," he said.
Lead author Associate Professor Steven Bozinovski from the University of Melbourne said the findings were significant because SAA was normally made in the liver, but they found that very high levels were made in the lungs of COPD patients. "It was a breakthrough for us to confirm that SAA played such a key role in the lung," he said.
The team confirmed that SAA not only caused inflammation but hindered natural healing in the lung.
Harvard's Associate Professor Bruce Levy said, they found that as the SAA interacted with its receptor it not only triggered lung inflammation, it also stopped a natural healing molecule which helped to turn off inflammation and heal the lung.
"This mechanism appears to explain one of the reasons that inflammation in COPD just never resolves despite stopping smoking," he said.
The discovery could lead to the development of a dual treatment by firstly, targeting SAA to switch off its function in the lung and secondly, adding a synthetic form of the natural healing agent to boost lung healing. Clinical development for the synthetic agent is currently under way in the US.
The proposed combined treatment could also improve the effectiveness of steroid treatment for COPD, which is effective in treating other lung diseases such as asthma.
"Steroid treatments work in conditions like asthma by turning off the production of inflammatory substances; however, our latest finding reveals that steroids actually fail to block the production of SAA and hence inflammation in the lung," Professor Anderson said.
"We believe SAA plays a critical role in why steroids are much less effective than they should be in treating COPD," he said.
It is hoped the new treatment will go to clinical trial within the next seven years.
"This is not a golden ticket to smoke," he said. "We are hopeful the combined treatment will assist patients of all stages of COPD, particularly those in stage four with constant hospital visits, to improve their quality of life, but it would not cure disease," he said.
He said the only way to prevent COPD is not to smoke. "If you are currently smoking the best thing to do is to quit as this will prevent the worsening of COPD," he said.
INFORMATION:
The research was funded in part by the National Health and Medical Research Council (Australia) and the National Institute of Health (US).
END
FRESNO, Calif. – Can eating grapes slow or help prevent the onset of age-related macular degeneration (AMD), a debilitating condition affecting millions of elderly people worldwide? Results from a new study published in Free Radical Biology and Medicine suggest this might be the case. The antioxidant actions of grapes are believed to be responsible for these protective effects.
The study compared the impact of an antioxidant-rich diet on vision using mice prone to developing retinal damage in old age in much the same way as humans do. Mice either received a grape-enriched ...
Fungi may be unexpected allies in our efforts to keep hazardous lead under control. That's based on the unexpected discovery that fungi can transform lead into its most stable mineral form. The findings reported online on January 12 in Current Biology, a Cell Press publication, suggest that this interaction between fungi and lead may be occurring in nature anywhere the two are found together. It also suggests that the introduction or encouragement of fungi may be a useful treatment strategy for lead-polluted sites.
"Lead is usually regarded as a pretty stable substance," ...
CHESTNUT HILL, MA (Jan. 12, 2012) – Researchers from Boston College have discovered a protein that plays a pivotal role in the progression of the deadly diseases toxoplasmosis and malaria and shown that its function could be genetically blocked in order to halt the progress of the parasite-borne illnesses, the team reports in the current edition of the journal Science.
The protein, identified as DOC2.1, plays a similar role in the secretion of microneme organelles that are crucial to the mobility of the parasitic protozoa Toxoplasma gondii, which causes toxoplasmosis, ...
Preserving diverse plant life will be crucial to buffer the negative effects of climate change and desertification in in the world's drylands, according to a new landmark study.
The findings of the multi-author study, published today in the journal Science, are based on samples of ecosystems in every continent except Antarctica.
They confirm for the first time that the more diverse an ecosystem is, the more ecological functions it performs. It also has implications for carbon sequestration and soil health.
"This is the most extensive study of the links between function ...
Land areas that are a priority for wildlife conservation provide relatively high levels of ecosystem services such as pollination, water purification, food production, and climate regulation, so safeguarding them is expected to benefit people. Assessing these benefits to populations in ways that are useful to decisionmakers who guide conservation efforts has, however, proved difficult.
A global analysis published in the January 2012 issue of BioScience by Will R. Turner of Conservation International and his colleagues breaks new ground by analyzing the flow of benefits ...
Archaeologists examining late period Mayan containers have identified nicotine traces from a codex-style flask, revealing the first physical evidence of tobacco use by ancient Mayans. The study published in Rapid Communications in Mass Spectrometry reveals the flask is marked with Mayan hieroglyphics reading, "y-otoot 'u-may," ("the home of its/his/her tobacco,") making it only the second case to confirm that the text on the exterior of a Mayan vessel corresponds to its ancient use.
"Investigation of food items consumed by ancient people offers insight into the traditions ...
Scientists from IBM and the German Center for Free-Electron Laser Science (CFEL) have built the world's smallest magnetic data storage unit. It uses just twelve atoms per bit, the basic unit of information, and squeezes a whole byte (8 bit) into as few as 96 atoms. A modern hard drive, for comparison, still needs more than half a billion atoms per byte. The team present their work in the weekly journal Science this Friday (13 January 2012). CFEL is a joint venture of the research centre Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron DESY in Hamburg, the Max-Planck-Society (MPG) and the ...
Some two decades into the grand national experiment with charter schools, how much do we really know about them? Not all that much. And not nearly as much as we easily could, say researchers from the University of California, San Diego Division of Social Sciences.
Writing in the journal Science, UC San Diego educational economist JuIian Betts and Richard Atkinson, president emeritus of the University of California and former director of the National Science Foundation, find that most studies of charter schools "use unsophisticated methods that tell us little about causal ...
In a breakthrough paper published in Science, researchers from The University of Manchester, The University of Bristol and Sandia National Laboratories report the potentially revolutionary effects of Criegee biradicals.
These invisible chemical intermediates are powerful oxidisers of pollutants such as nitrogen dioxide and sulfur dioxide, produced by combustion, and can naturally clean up the atmosphere.
Although these chemical intermediates were hypothesised in the 1950s, it is only now that they have been detected.
Scientists now believe that, with further research, ...
Boston, MA — Dozens of studies, many from Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) researchers, have shown that low-fat diets are no better for health than moderate- or high-fat diets—and for many people, may be worse.
To combat this "low fat is best" myth, nutrition experts at HSPH and chefs and registered dietitians at The Culinary Institute of America (CIA) have developed five new muffin recipes that incorporate healthy fats and whole grains, and use a lighter hand on the salt and sugar. Their goal? To "make over" the ubiquitous low-fat muffin, touted as a "better-for-you" ...
