Asthma patients should soak up some sun!
Vitamin D could act as a possible new treatment for asthma, as it has the potential to significantly reduce the symptoms of the condition, a new study has found.
Severe asthma is currently treated with steroid tablets which can have harmful side effects. Many sufferers have a steroid resistant variation of the condition making it even more difficult to treat and resulting in frequent admissions to hospital with severe, even life-threatening attacks.
Scientists at the King's College, London identified a mechanism through which Vitamin D can reduce asthma symptoms, providing a potential target for future treatments.
IL -17A is a natural chemical which helps to defend the body against infection, but is known to exacerbate asthma and reduce responsiveness to steroids when produced in larger amounts.
Researchers examined the production of IL-17A and levels of the chemical in cells from 18 steroid resistant asthma patients and 10 patients who responded to steroids as well as a control group of 10 healthy participants.
Results showed that patients with asthma had much higher levels of IL-17A than those without it and patients with steroid resistant asthma expressed the highest levels.
Further observation showed that while steroids were unable to lower the production of IL-17A in cells from patients with asthma, Vitamin D significantly reduced the production of IL-17A in cells from all patients studied.
The results demonstrate that Vitamin D could potentially provide an effective add-on treatment for all asthma sufferers, reducing the amount of steroid-based medicines.
"These findings are very exciting as they show that Vitamin D could one day be used not only to treat people with steroid resistant asthma but also to reduce the doses of steroids in other asthma patients, reducing the risk of harmful side effects," Professor Catherine Hawrylowicz from the King's MRC & Asthma UK Centre in Allergic Mechanisms of Asthma, lead author of the study, said.
The study was published in the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology.
