Asthma
People with asthma have airways that become inflamed when exposed to triggers. This inflammation makes it difficult to breathe and leads to mild symptoms like wheezing, coughing or breathlessness.
Who gets asthma?
It affects 1 in 9 Australians, around 1 in 4 children develop asthma sometime in their childhood. It is possible for adults to develop the disease even if they didn’t have it as a child.
What are the different types of disease?
It can range from mild, intermittent symptoms to severe and persistent wheezing and shortness of breath.
A person with severe asthma will have regular symptoms and asthma attacks despite being on medication. In some of these people the disease has a severe impact on their quality of life and may be life-threatening.
The four main categories are:
- Intermittent
- Mild persistent
- Moderate persistent
- Severe persistent
What are the causes?
The causes of asthma are not completely understood. The strongest risk factors are a combination of genetic and environmental factors.
- Respiratory infections such as colds and flu
- Air pollutants and irritants, such as smoke and work-related triggers
- Allergy related triggers, such as pollen, dust mites, mould spores, pet dander or particles of cockroach waste.
- Exercise
- Other triggers can be environmental conditions, certain medicines and stress or high emotions
What are the symptoms?
People experience symptoms due to the inflammation and narrowing of their airways. The most common symptoms are:
- Breathlessness
- Wheezing
- Tight feeling in the chest
- Coughing
Symptoms often vary and not all people experience all of these symptoms.
How is it treated?
Currently, there are several treatment approaches available for symptoms but there are no cures.
The three main types of asthma medications are:
Relievers
Asthma reliever medication helps open up the airways to quickly relieve symptoms during an asthma attack.
Preventers
Asthma preventer medicine helps by relaxing your airways with anti-inflammatory medicine – usually corticosteroids – into your lungs.
Controllers
Asthma controller medicine is used when a preventer medication isn’t enough. Working similar to reliever medications they last longer and are often combined with a preventer medicine into a single inhaler.
Treatment in severe asthma
Severe asthma is asthma that is not controlled despite the correct use of prescribed preventer medicines they may need additional treatments.
Asthma survey
Are you one of the over 2 million Australians that have Asthma? We want to know about what living with Asthma is like for you.
Take our survey and share your experiences of your diagnosis, treatment and care opportunities.
Our research
At Centenary we are focusing our work on asthma and other respiratory diseases that have poor outcomes for patients. There are currently no cures for asthma. We believe by looking at the impact of inflammation we can find potential treatments in numerous areas.
Our work includes projects that look at the effects of inflammation, molecular impacts of infections and oxidative stress. The epigenetic changes and fibrotic tissue remodelling on the airways and lungs and the role of our diet and microbiome.
Professor Phil Hansbro, Director of the Centenary UTS Centre for Inflammation leads this research.
Inflammation is a critical driver of many disease features of Asthma including wheezing, severe breathing difficulties and impaired gas exchange.
There are many different molecular processes that contribute to inflammation including inflammatory epithelial cells, macrophages, mast cells, complement system and inflammasomes, that we have high level expertise in.
We have specific tools that we can use to define their specific roles and we are looking these to define which are most important in driving Asthma.
Oxidative stress and immunometabolism, the study of metabolic pathway usage in an immune cell, are major drivers of Asthma and other chronic respiratory diseases.
We have several new compounds, some naturally derived, that target and suppress these factors at their source.
This source is damaged mitochondria that become dysfunctional when exposed to cigarette and bushfire smoke, air pollution and other environmental challenges.
We are analysing the microbial populations (the microbiome) and the factors that they produce (metabolites) in the lung and the gut. The research looks at how the microbiome drives or protects against Asthma.
We are also looking at how these results can be modified with specific dietary components.
Epigenetics is the study of processes that modify DNA without affecting its sequence.
We are working out how epigenetics change in Asthma, in particular we look at microRNA, acetylation and methylation. We also look at how these change the activity of diseases and drive disease features.
Fibrosis is the deposition of collagen around the airways and in lung tissue leading to hardening and damage of the airways and alveoli causing difficulties in breathing. It is a major feature of Asthma but current therapies have little effect against it.
Our advanced knowledge of the role of inflammation and how it drives fibrosis in the airways and lung.
We are performing several studies where we perform big data analysis of different groups of factors. These include mRNA, microRNA, proteins, phosphoproteins, lipids, microbiomes, metabolomes, acetylation and methylation.
We integrate all of these analyses together to create a more holistic view of how Asthma develops and progresses. This technique is also used to identify pivotal factors that control different parts of the disease and may be more effective targets for therapy.
We can use our expertise in each of these above areas to develop new therapies to prevent or reverse the development of disease features in asthma.
This page was last reviewed by a Centenary researcher on 1 September, 2022.
Asthma survey
Are you one of the over 2 million Australians that have Asthma? We want to know about what living with Asthma is like for you.
Take our survey and share your experiences of your diagnosis, treatment and care opportunities.
Our research
At Centenary we are focusing our work on asthma and other respiratory diseases that have poor outcomes for patients. There are currently no cures for asthma. We believe by looking at the impact of inflammation we can find potential treatments in numerous areas.
Our work includes projects that look at the effects of inflammation, molecular impacts of infections and oxidative stress. The epigenetic changes and fibrotic tissue remodelling on the airways and lungs and the role of our diet and microbiome.
Professor Phil Hansbro, Director of the Centenary UTS Centre for Inflammation leads this research.
Inflammation is a critical driver of many disease features of Asthma including wheezing, severe breathing difficulties and impaired gas exchange.
There are many different molecular processes that contribute to inflammation including inflammatory epithelial cells, macrophages, mast cells, complement system and inflammasomes, that we have high level expertise in.
We have specific tools that we can use to define their specific roles and we are looking these to define which are most important in driving Asthma.
Oxidative stress and immunometabolism, the study of metabolic pathway usage in an immune cell, are major drivers of Asthma and other chronic respiratory diseases.
We have several new compounds, some naturally derived, that target and suppress these factors at their source.
This source is damaged mitochondria that become dysfunctional when exposed to cigarette and bushfire smoke, air pollution and other environmental challenges.
We are analysing the microbial populations (the microbiome) and the factors that they produce (metabolites) in the lung and the gut. The research looks at how the microbiome drives or protects against Asthma.
We are also looking at how these results can be modified with specific dietary components.
Epigenetics is the study of processes that modify DNA without affecting its sequence.
We are working out how epigenetics change in Asthma, in particular we look at microRNA, acetylation and methylation. We also look at how these change the activity of diseases and drive disease features.
Fibrosis is the deposition of collagen around the airways and in lung tissue leading to hardening and damage of the airways and alveoli causing difficulties in breathing. It is a major feature of Asthma but current therapies have little effect against it.
Our advanced knowledge of the role of inflammation and how it drives fibrosis in the airways and lung.
We are performing several studies where we perform big data analysis of different groups of factors. These include mRNA, microRNA, proteins, phosphoproteins, lipids, microbiomes, metabolomes, acetylation and methylation.
We integrate all of these analyses together to create a more holistic view of how Asthma develops and progresses. This technique is also used to identify pivotal factors that control different parts of the disease and may be more effective targets for therapy.
We can use our expertise in each of these above areas to develop new therapies to prevent or reverse the development of disease features in asthma.