In today’s world there are many diseases for which nobody can find a cure; some are life-threatening while others just compromise a person’s quality of life. Their symptoms can be managed but the medical world has yet to find a definitive cure for them. Most of these diseases are not related to each other in any way; developing one will not cause someone to develop another. But in some cases, like in the cases of eczema and asthma, there are connections that make no real sense but remain nonetheless.
Eczema is basically a skin condition that causes different types of inflammation in the outermost layer of the skin, the epidermis. There are varying degrees of severity that go along with eczema as well as many different symptoms – skin swelling or crusting, cracking and flaking, redness, itching and even bleeding or oozing in some cases. There are medications that can greatly control eczema’s symptoms – these are known as corticosteroids. These types of medicines are very effective at controlling a person’s eczema but the disease cannot be cured at this time.
Asthma, meanwhile, is a chronic inflammation of the lungs where the airways end up narrowed so that breathing becomes difficult or almost impossible. Approximately 7% of the US population suffers from asthma and 300 million people total worldwide suffer from it. Asthma symptoms include shortness of breath even when the body is at rest; a chronic cough; nighttime coughing and tightness in the chest. Asthma attacks have varying severity levels; they range from mild to severe enough to actually cause death and while asthma can be controlled in most cases with medication, there is no cure.
These diseases are so seemingly unrelated that many doctors didn’t make a connection between the two until recently. However, nearly 50% of children – especially young children – who develop eczema will go on to develop asthma in a short period of time. Doctors have discovered that when eczema occurs, it causes a substance to be secreted by the body’s damaged skin. This substance then ends up triggering allergy-like symptoms in the body which explains why many – especially very young children – often develop asthma after they develop eczema.
This is an invaluable discovery to the medical world. If scientists can stop the skin from secreting that substance, they can stop children from developing asthma needlessly. If scientists can successfully do this, it will help save children from needlessly developing asthma.
