The world is filled with diseases for which nobody has found a cure yet; some of these diseases are very severe while others just cause discomfort. 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 a few cases, like in the case of eczema and asthma, there is reason to suspect that developing one will cause the other one to develop as well.
Eczema is a type of skin condition that’s characterized by inflammation of the epidermis, or outer layer of the skin that can often be painful. 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 diseases that causes a chronic inflammation in the lungs that causes the airways to constrict and narrow, making it difficult to breathe. Asthma is one of the world’s most common diseases – 7% of the people in the United States have it and over 300 million people worldwide do. Symptoms of asthma include things like shortness of breath even when at rest; nighttime coughing; a chronic cough that sounds like throat-clearing and tightness in the chest. There are different severity levels of asthma; it ranges from mild to severe enough to cause death and while it can usually be adequately controlled with medication it cannot be cured either.
These diseases are so seemingly unrelated that many doctors didn’t make a connection between the two until recently. However, 50% of all young children who develop eczema will go on to develop asthma as well. Scientists have only recently discovered that when the skin becomes damaged due to eczema, that skin begins to secrete a substance that ends up circulating in the body’s bloodstream. This substance ends up circulating in the bloodstream – and through the lungs, then sets off asthma-like symptoms that develop into full-blown asthma, which is why young children who develop eczema will go on to also have asthma.
This is an invaluable discovery to the medical world. Scientists now believe that if they can stop the body from secreting that substance into the bloodstream, they can stop children from developing asthma. If scientists can successfully do this, it will help save children from needlessly developing asthma.
