New treatment first offered in Louisville is helping asthma sufferers

Shannon Denson, who has severe asthma, gets bronchial
thermoplasty. Courier-Journal photo.

Asthma sufferers can now benefit from an innovative treatment that was first offered at University Hospital in Louisville.

Patients like Shannon Denson are seeing improvement thanks to bronchial thermoplasty, "a minimally invasive, three-step procedure using heat to open airways in adults with severe asthma so they can breathe more easily," reports Laura Ungar of The Courier-Journal.

"Over the years, airways become very narrow. This opens them up," said Dr. Tanya Wiese, an interventional pulmonologist with University of Louisville Physicians, which partnered with UH to offer the treatment.

The treatment is not a cure but it does improve the condition of the lungs, which is good news since asthma rates are high in Kentucky. In the Ohio Valley, almost 15 percent of Kentucky adults said they had asthma, making it the seventh-highest rate in 2010, a survey by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found. (Read more)

Patients in isolated rural areas have higher rates of death from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease

Patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease living in isolated rural areas "seem to be at greater risk" of death from COPD than those living in urban areas, even when "hospital rurality and volume" are taken into account, says a new study published in the latest issue of the Annals of Internal Medicine.

Researchers from Iowa City Veterans Affairs Medical Center collected data from COPD patients at 129 veterans' hospitals measuring first, 30-day mortality and then adusting for patient rurality, hospital volume, and hospital rurality. The results indicate "mortality was significantly elevated in patients living in isolated rural areas compared with those living in urban areas," regardless of patient and hospital characteristics, reports Doctors Lounge, an online medical resource for physicians, students and allied clinical professionals. (Read more)