Why wouldn’t a lung transplant cure/get rid of asthma?
In: Biology
So few things here. Being a transplant patient can help as they are put on immune suppressing drugs. This is not a cure and you can still have an attack however. Further asthma affects more than just the lungs such as with the trachea and throat. A replaced lung does not replace these tissues. Finally much of the immune response is not localized to the place the response is triggered. Realize only a portion of the asthma is caused by defective lung tissue.
Succinct answer copied from an outside source: Asthma as defined is an obstructive disease due to bronchospasms of parts that are not necessarily the lungs. If a lung transplant occured, they would’nt replace the bronchial tree / trachea along with it where most of asthma spasms take place. It is not a COPD obstructive disease like Emphysema (which occur within the lung structures itself, and if severe enough to the point of life ending causes, can be cured with lung transplants (but that’s rarely done because it never gets to that point with proper medicinal management)
Also, lung transplant recipients typically only have a 5-10 year survival rate, and run the risk of rejection in that time. With risks like that, lung transplants are only reserved for people with conditions that will cause them to die soon without them. Asthma is very very rarely ever that severe.
It’s an autoimmune disorder. Since the transplant isn’t giving you a new immune system, it can’t eliminate the cause of the asthma. Of course with a transplant, you’ll be getting immunosuppressants so that might mitigate the asthma. But in any case, the risks of a lung transplant far outweigh the risks of having asthma, and the number of people who need lung transplants because otherwise they’ll die, and very soon, give them a much higher priority than people with asthma.
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