WASHINGTON — People with severe asthma are getting a radically different treatment option: a way to snake a wire inside their lungs and melt off some of the tissue that squeezes their airways shut.
Bronchial thermoplasty isn’t for everyone, just a subset who wheeze despite today’s best medications. It’s neither a cure nor without risk. But the Alair system, rolling out this month, offers the first method of physically altering spasm-prone airways.
“It’s like slow suffocation,” says John Rapp, 59, of Arlington, Va., who wound up in the ER four or five times a year before participating in a study of bronchial thermoplasty.
Asthma is two-pronged. First, inflammation inside the lung’s branchlike airways narrows those channels to make breathing difficult. The airways also contain a layer of muscle tissue that spasms and thickens when something irritates the lungs.
Bronchial thermoplasty beams radio-frequency waves to heat and shrink that muscle layer so that airways can’t constrict as badly during an asthma attack.
Rapp hasn’t made an ER visit in the three years since his thermoplasty and says the shortness of breath he experienced from a partially collapsed lung after one trial treatment cleared up quickly. “I can run around like a wild idiot,” he says. “I’m always going to have asthma symptoms, but this greatly reduces them.”
