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Antibody Injection May Benefit Patients With Severe Asthma
The study by Dr. Param Nair and colleagues based at The Firestone Institute for Respiratory Disease, St. Joseph's Healthcare, found patients who require a lot of medication, including prednisone, to control their disease benefit from the injections.
The research published in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM), investigated asthmatics with a persisting type of airway inflammation with inflammatory cells called eosinophils. It is estimated there are 60,000 to 120,000 Canadians with this condition.
"Mepolizumab works by blocking the production of eosinophils," said the study's senior author Dr. Paul O'Byrne. "By preventing their production, we were able to improve asthma, reduce the need for prednisone and really show that eosinophils are important in causing asthma symptoms in these patients." O'Byrne is the E. J. Moran Campbell Professor in Respiratory Medicine and chair of the Department of Medicine at McMaster University, and executive director of the Firestone Institute of Respiratory Health at St. Joseph's Healthcare Hamilton.
Of three million asthmatics in Canada, about five to eight per cent are severe asthmatics. About half of these have severe asthma with persistent eosinophilia. Although these asthmatics are fewer in number, they represent huge costs to the health care system because frequent flare-ups which can require admission to hospital.
For their study, McMaster researchers recruited 20 mature asthmatic patients (56 58 years of age) who had been taking about 10 milligrams of prednisone for approximately nine years, along with other available asthma medication. For doctors, this is a difficult group to manage because of the many drugs they need to control their disease and the side-effects of prednisone which include weight gain, bone loss and an increased risk of diabetes.
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