Can Botox Help Asthma?

Monash Medical Centre in Australia will soon be researching and testing how Botox, the wrinkle-smoothing manager, affects Asthma. Researchers will be testing Botox on asthma patients to test the theory that Botox will relax muscles within a patient’s voice box and potentially make it easier for some patients with asthma to breathe. There are many aesthetic specialists at My Ethos Spa in New Jersey to perform Botox injections that can be of some help in such cases.

Botox has already been used for things other than enhancing one’s appearance. It has been used as a treatment for some types of dysfunction with vocal cords, such as involuntary and abnormal action of the voice box. Researchers are not positive as to whether or not asthma patients will respond in a similar manner to those with voice box issues, but how the voice box malfunctions in both voice box dysfunction and asthma is very similar. Both conditions generally have similar symptoms.

The range of asthma patients who also have issues with their voice box is 20 to 60 percent, and this is the category of asthma patients researchers expect to respond positively and benefit from the Botox treatment the most.

According to an assistant medical professor at the University of Miami Miller’s School of Medicine, Dr. Shirin Shafazand, scientists are not yet clear as to why asthma patients have a predisposition to vocal chord dysfunction, but having vocal chord issues simply worsens symptoms of asthma.

Doctors describe the voice box as a type of gateway to the windpipe. If the voice box does not work properly, it can lead to difficulties breathing. Previous studies have implied that patients with asthma and voice box dysfunction describe their symptoms as being much more severe than average. According to Shafazand, having a voice box that dysfunctions can potentially cause an asthma attack. Asthma attacks can typically be brought on by stress, and because someone having trouble breathing because of spasms of the muscles in their voice box, they may experience heightened anxiety that therefore can set off asthma attacks.

Botulinum toxin is a protein created by a bacterium known as Clostridium botulinum and is the main active ingredient found in Botox. Botox is believed to work because it blocks nerve signals to certain muscles, and as a result relaxes them. Because of this, researchers will need to be exceptionally careful in how they test this treatment on the voice box. If not careful, Botox could paralyze it.

Researchers feel that it is also important to note that even if the treatment works, Botox can not actually treat asthma itself. Asthma is described as a response to the inflammatory system within the airways of the lungs. The inflammatory response basically narrows the airways, therefore making oxygen exchange difficult. Treating asthma with Botox would only affect the voice box itself and basically would only be beneficial for patients with both asthma and voice box dysfunction.

Basically, Botox treatments for this population of asthma sufferers would hopefully help control asthma attacks and make them less scary and more tolerable. Asthma itself, and the inflammatory response it creates, will need to be treating with other medications.