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Breathe more easily — help is on the way
There are times when the ingenuity of these scientist types just takes your breath away. Not only do they do all these massively clever things to invent drugs and keep us healthy, they also make up really neat acronyms. This week’s top prize for making meaning match form goes to a group of Australian medical researchers. They are going to be using zithromax (generic name azithromycin), one of the macrolide antibiotics, to see whether it can help those who suffer from asthma breathe more easily. The study is the Asthma and Macrolides: AZithromycin Efficacy and Safety (AMAZES) — they really should have aimed for “amazing” but we forgive them. This is a moderately serious problem in Australia with slightly over four hundred deaths from asthma in 2006. With major funding made available, this will be the largest study of its type into asthma the world has ever seen. The hypothesis under test is not quite what you might expect. Under normal circumstances, doctors use an antibiotic to treat a bacterial infection. So long as the doctor matches the antibiotic to the susceptible strain of bacteria causing the infection, you get better. But rather than aim at any infection as the cause of, or an aggravating feature in, asthma, the doctors are hoping that zithromax will reduce the inflammation in the lungs and so ease the breathing. This takes us into very tricky waters of cause and effect because often the cause of the inflammation is an infection. However, there has already been a short preliminary study and the results have been encouraging. This is now a full-scale test in five centres located in three major cities in Australia. If successful, the hope and expectation is that zithromax will become a more routine part of the treatment for those with chronic and persistent asthma. Until the results are out, most doctors will continue to use drugs to treat the eosinophils which are thought to be one of the primary causes of the inflammation. The problem with this approach is that only about 50% of asthma suffers have elevated levels of eosinophils and so respond to the treatment. If the use of zithromax treats both groups with “normal” and increased levels of eosinophils, zithromax will be accepted as the better general treatment.
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