Asthma is a chronic lung disease that causes wheezing, chest tightness, coughing, and shortness of breath when something — like an allergen, smoke, or cold air — irritates your airways, making them swell, fill with mucus, and narrow.
Minimizing your contact with known asthma triggers can help prevent these symptom flares, or asthma attacks, while following a comprehensive asthma management plan can help you control the condition long-term. Your personal asthma action plan offers detailed guidance on how to:
But what if these tried-and-true steps don’t work to keep your asthma well-controlled? What if you have frequent or extreme asthma attacks that often require emergency care, despite your best efforts?
You may have eosinophilic asthma, a severe form of the disease that requires a more nuanced treatment approach. Here, our expert team at Fivestar Pulmonary Associates discusses the ins and outs of eosinophilic asthma, including how an innovative biologic therapy called Fasenra® can help.
Asthma isn’t a singular lung condition; instead, it’s a group of similar conditions that make it hard to breathe by causing airway inflammation, blockage, and spasms.
Allergic asthma can cause these symptoms when you’re exposed to something you’re allergic to. Nonallergic asthma, on the other hand, may occur when your airway is irritated by cold air or smoke. Exercise-induced asthma tends to present during physical activity.
Eosinophilic asthma, a more severe form of the condition, occurs when your airways contain abnormally high levels of eosinophils — a type of white blood cell that your immune system employs to fight off infection.
Eosinophils are a normal part of a healthy immune system. When your immune system produces too many of these cells, however, they can overreact and trigger inflammation throughout your body, including within your lungs.
Eosinophilic asthma can have allergic or nonallergic triggers. Once an asthma attack has been set in motion by these triggers, high eosinophil levels act to boost the inflammatory response and increase airway swelling.
People with eosinophilic asthma typically have more frequent asthma attacks and more severe symptom flares. They also tend to have less success controlling their symptoms with standard asthma medications.
Eosinophilic asthma isn’t the most common form of asthma, but it is the most common cause of severe, poorly controlled asthma. About 27 million people in the United States have asthma; of those, roughly 2.7 million Americans (10%) have severe asthma.
Eosinophilic asthma accounts for about four in five cases (80%) of severe asthma.
When controller medicines don’t work as well as they should for eosinophilic asthma — especially if you’ve had severe asthma attacks that resulted in two or more hospitalizations within the last year — it may be time to add a targeted therapy to your treatment plan.
This type of asthma treatment is known as a biologic, or monoclonal antibody, therapy.
Biologic treatments for eosinophilic asthma target specific immune cells to block their inflammatory response and, in turn, reduce asthma symptoms. Fasenra is one of these targeted biologic treatments.
How does it work? Fasenra contains benralizumab, a monoclonal antibody (protein) that attaches itself to certain receptors on the surface of eosinophil cells. This prompts your immune system to send specific cells that can break down the problematic eosinophils, so your body can eliminate them naturally.
This helps reduce airway inflammation, leading to milder, less frequent asthma symptoms. Fasenra has been shown to improve lung function and breathing, reduce the use of daily oral steroids by 75%, and lower asthma attack occurrence by up to 51%.
We administer the Fasenra biologic via injection right here in our office. After three starter doses given on day one, week four, and week eight, you continue to receive one dose every eight weeks. It’s as simple as that.
Struggling with severe, poorly controlled asthma can diminish your quality of life and increase your risk of emergency room visits, hospitalization, and death. But it doesn’t have to be this way. Biologic treatment can help you control your condition and give you a new lease on life.
If you like the idea of adding a targeted treatment to your eosinophilic asthma plan — one that harnesses your immune system and works with your body to improve your condition — Fasenra may be the solution you’ve been waiting for.
To learn more, call or click online to schedule a visit at your nearest Fivestar Pulmonary Associates office in Allen, McKinney, or Plano, Texas, today. In the meantime, you can get started by filling out our asthma control test.
