SMU researchers expand study that shows promise
As the health care reform debate turns to cutting costs and improving treatment outcomes, two professors at Southern Methodist University in Dallas are expanding a study that shows promise for reducing both the expense and suffering associated with chronic asthma.
Thomas Ritz and Alicia Meuret, both in SMU's Psychology Department, have developed a four-week program to teach asthmatics how to better control their condition by changing the way they breathe.
With the help of a four-year, $1.4 million grant from the National Institutes of Health, they plan to engage 120 Dallas County patients in four weeks of breathing training by the study's projected end in July 2011. Their co-investigators include David Rosenfield, also of SMU's Psychology Department, and Mark Millard, M.D., of Baylor University Medical Center in Dallas.
More than 22 million Americans suffer from asthma at an estimated annual economic cost of more than $19 billion, according to the American Lung Association. The number of cases doubled between 1980 and 1995, prompting the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to classify the disease as an epidemic in 2000.
During an attack, sufferers tend to hyperventilate, breathing fast and deep against constricted airways to fight an overwhelming feeling of oxygen deprivation.
Unfortunately, this makes the problem worse by lowering the body's carbon dioxide levels, which restricts blood flow to the brain and can further irritate already hypersensitive bronchial passages.
Patients who "overbreathe" on a sustained basis risk chronic CO2 deficiencies that make them even more vulnerable to future attacks. Rescue medications that relieve asthma symptoms do nothing to correct breathing difficulties associated with hyperventilation.