“Harmless” virus may hide and cause asthma

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A usually harmless childhood virus may hide in the lungs and come back to cause wheezing and other symptoms of asthma, U.S. researchers reported on Tuesday.

They found evidence that respiratory syncytial virus or RSV stayed in the lungs of mice and caused the overactive airway symptoms that characterize asthma.

“This research suggests that there’s a potential new mechanism for asthma related to viral infections in children that could be associated with RSV,” pediatrician Dr. Asuncion Mejias of the University of Texas Southwestern, who led the study, said in a statement.

“These findings could aid in the development of preventive and therapeutic interventions for children with recurrent wheezing due to a virus such as RSV.”

Nearly every child is infected with RSV early in life, and the virus usually clears up without serious complications in about a week. But 3 percent to 10 percent of infants with RSV infections develop severe bronchitis and must be treated in the hospital.

Doctors also thought the body quickly cleared itself of those types of viruses. But writing in the Journal of Infectious Diseases, the researchers said it may persist in some children.

They previously showed that RSV infection could raise the likelihood of chronic lung disease in mice.

For this experiment, the UTSW team infected mice with either live RSV or viruses weakened by ultraviolet light or heat.

After 42 days, the researchers found evidence of the virus in every mouse infected with live RSV, but not in the others.  Continued…

Source

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Related Posts:


By Julie Steenhuysen CHICAGO (Reuters) - Babies born four months before the peak cold and flu season have a 30 percent higher risk of developing asthma, U.S. researchers said on Friday, suggesting that these common infections may trigger asthma. “All infants are exposed to this and it is potentially preventable,” said Dr. Tina Hartert, director of the

Full Post: Autumn babies at greater risk of asthma: study
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

LONDON (Reuters) - Babies born by Caesarean section are more likely to develop asthma than children delivered naturally, Swiss researchers said on Tuesday. There has been conflicting evidence on the link between asthma and C-sections but the researchers said the number of children involved in their study and a long monitoring period strengthened their results. The findings

Full Post: Researchers link C-section babies to asthma risk
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Researchers have found out what made the 1918 flu pandemic so deadly — a group of three genes that lets the virus invade the lungs and cause pneumonia. They mixed samples of the 1918 influenza strain with modern seasonal flu viruses to find the three genes and said their study might help in

Full Post: Researchers unlock secrets of 1918 flu pandemic
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Researchers say they have developed a cream that might prevent herpes infection for as long as a week — a potentially big step in protecting women from the sexually transmitted infection. The cream uses a new kind of therapy called RNA interference to turn off genes that the virus uses to invade cells,

Full Post: New cream disables herpes virus: study
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

By Gene Emery BOSTON (Reuters) - Giving steroids to children who are wheezing because of viral or other infections does not help, researchers reported on Wednesday. And an experimental treatment designed to prevent wheezing may be effective, but it seems to pose too many risks to be recommended, according to studies published in the New England Journal

Full Post: When kids wheeze, steroids don’t help: studies

Site Navigation

Most Read

Search

Contact

  • kinwrite.com@gmail.com