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New Hope For Asthma Sufferers

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Jul 8, 2008 5:27 pm US/Eastern

New Hope For Asthma Sufferers

(KDKA) Twenty-million Americans suffer from asthma.

This chronic inflammatory lung disease can be life altering for some people.

One scientist is helping answer the question of why some people are more prone to this disease that others.

James Lee has always been affected by asthma, so much that it almost caused his death.

He survived though, and made asthma research his life's work.

Dr. Lee is a researcher at the Mayo Clinic and has been studying the effects of eosinophils in asthma patients.

Although rare, eosinophils are white blood cells found in all of us.

"A normally healthy individual may represent only one percent of all the white blood cells, but in an asthmatic, it's one of the dominant cell types that infiltrates the lung," explains Dr. Lee.

To study the effects of these cells on asthma, he engineered mice without eosinophils.

They were then exposed to an allergen to see if asthma developed and it did not.

"When we eliminated eosinophils, to our absolute delight, the prediction would have been that asthma disease symptoms would go down," says Dr. Lee, "and they did go down."

He says current treatments for asthma patients work but have side effects, and he hopes his research will lead to more effective treatments.

When asked if he can get the therapies down to where there is absolutely no side effects, he says that he's "targeting the things that are important and leaving everything else in place. That would be the best thing we could do for a patient for sure."

For general information on asthma:
 American Academy of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology
 Asthma and Allergy Foundation of America
 National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute

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