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Essay On Concomitant Asthma

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One of the main challenges we face today is being able to distinguish if symptoms such as wheezing are due to concomitant asthma or due to their underlying CF-related lung disease. There are many CF patients that produce asthma-like symptoms such as wheezing and coughing but it is a weak indicator in diagnosing people with CF asthma16. A global study demonstrated a prevalence of 2-37% of asthma-like symptoms found in teenage children which varied when taking into consideration the country they were based in16.
Therefore, it is rational to expect that a large amount of CF patients will also have concomitant asthma, however, this hypothesis is delicately fragile especially when there have been papers published debating whether or not the heterozygosity of the CF gene predisposes CF patients in developing asthma. As one study proposes that the 508 mutations might provide protective properties from developing asthma17, another study opposes this theory. One of these opposing studies demonstrated this via a cross-sectional method where 9141 individuals were recruited and had genotype testing performed; where 250 CF patients had been identified to be 508 carriers18. The findings found that 9% of them had …show more content…

Also, even though asthma and CF have similar characteristics they are driven by different inflammatory agents where asthma is more eosinophilic based whereas CF is more neutrophilic24. When approached as two distinctly different aetiology, makes the mechanism of bronchodilators in CF questionable, however this will not inhibit its use as long as it can demonstrate improvement either in physiological testing or patient stated outcomes such their quality of life questionnaire had been approved than bronchodilators will continue to be

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