I have always had asthma
since I was a child
The lungs are like an upside down tree
and the tubes that surround the airways start to constrict.
When I was a child
having asthma meant that
I was kind of afraid
of really going for it in sports or
in play or exercise.
Unfortunately asthma is a disease that still kills people
the people who tend to die are in the younger age range between 15 to
30
The first thing you realise
and really it is almost a mental realisation you don't really feel it in your throat or
in your chest
is that
something is forced about your breathing . I think in the last century there has been
some truly landmarked discoveries, firstly was the discovery of the
receptors found on the muscle and that they were activated by
adrenaline.
Depending on how serious it gets
it feels like your lungs are just shrinking up into the
tops of your shoulders. Animals certainly have helped us
in both identifying the actions of adrenaline
and then being used to test these different analogues of adrenalin that
ultimately gave us, not only Salbutamol, which is the most widely prescribed breather
in the world
but other drugs that look like salbutamol.
You can't bring in any air and you can't push it down to any where useful inside your
body
but if it has reached that stage and I don't have an inhaler it is really worrying
it is really scary
There are 2 main types of treatment for asthma, 1
are those drugs that we sometimes call relievers or bronchodilators
that are able to very quickly relax the muscles round the airway
and make people feel better and relieve them of their symptoms
you may have a drug that works but you then have this difficult question of how do you
formulate it
to put it in something like this, that will sit in the shelf, for 6 months if
necessary and
you know that the next time you puff it
you're going to get delivered the amount of drug you want and it has not gone off.
Animals have helped in that process as well. The second class of drug are
really the drugs that we sometimes call preventors
where they don't make people feel better immediately but what they do is reduce
the inflammation in the airway wall
make the airway wall less twitchy and less susceptible to environmental
stimuli and triggers
and therefore people have less symptoms
My asthma gets triggered by
a really wide range of things
from
being around too much cigarette smoke
if I have a beer and then go out in the cold air, it gets me every time
The other thing that has certainly happened over the last century
is really the understanding that a lot of asthma can be
caused by allergy
and our understanding of allergy and particularly the antibodies in the body
that allow allergy to occur
have all been helped by work on animals and understanding the process of the
different chemicals that are released during an allergic response and you can trace
back the drugs that we now used to treat asthma that inhibit the action of
these chemicals, to work in the 1930's on guinea pigs looking at
the effects of snake venom
I mean, I have not had a bad attack for years now.
The last serious one was 2 or 3 years ago
and
you know and that's one where the chemicals they stop it becoming
really critical.
Today we have a very wide range of medicines for treating asthmatics
and indeed if asthmatics treat themselves properly they can lead normal
lives
and we have got good examples of people who can run in the olympics and win
medals.
Now,
as I have said, I feel
more in control