Asthma pressure may shrink airways
From San Francisco, at the spring national meeting of the American Chemical Society
The chest tightness that an asthma patient experiences may be in part the cause of the disease as well as a symptom.
Most physicians and scientists have believed that inflammation alone causes air passages to gradually narrow in asthmatics. However, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have discovered that the tightening of chest muscles during an asthma attack can trigger long-term changes in airways that constrict the passages.