Around half a million people in the UK have severe, difficult to treat asthma. They frequently experience severe asthma attacks and have almost continual asthma symptoms despite being prescribed high levels of asthma medicines.
People with severe asthma often have poor quality of life and are frequently admitted to hospital with severe, even life-threatening, asthma attacks.
In recent years, doctors and scientists have discovered that severe asthma is not a single condition.
Instead, symptoms can be caused by a diverse range of changes in the lungs, such as the accumulation of certain types of immune cells, thickening of the muscle layer lining the airways, a build-up of mucus, and chronic inflammation and over-sensitive or ‘twitchy’ airways.
Asthma UK is funding research that will underpin the creation of new treatments for severe asthma that work in entirely new ways.
For example, Professor Fan Chung in London is studying the oxygen balance in airway cells and how this contributes to symptoms.
We also want to understand the contribution of environmental triggers such as fungal spores, and find out how the problem of treatment resistance can be overcome.
Professor Catherine Hawrylowicz hopes that her Asthma UK work into vitamin D tablets will be a crucial step forwards in the treatment of severe asthma by making steroid treatments more effective.
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