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Bitter Taste May Battle Asthma
Scientific American People with asthma, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and other breathing disorders need fast relief when their airways tighten up. Unfortunately, the most commonly used medication has obnoxious side effects. But scientists recently discovered that … |
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Bitter substances block calcium channels, which can relax the tissue that tightens up during asthma attacks. Sophie Bushwick reports.
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 Boston Globe |
Could a bitter compound give clues about asthma?
Boston Globe Even more bizarre, scientists found them in cells that line the airway, and in the muscles that contract during an asthma attack. Basic scientific research began to suggest that bitter chemicals had potential as an asthma treatment. That is when … |
View full post on asthma – Google News
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Fight Asthma by Eating Bitter Foods?
CBS42 A hallmark of an asthma attack is excessive contraction of these smooth muscle cells, which causes narrowing of the airways and breathing difficulties. The fact that bitter substances can relax these smooth muscle cells suggests that they may have the … |
View full post on asthma – Google News
 RedOrbit |
Bitter Tasting Substances Can Help With Asthma Attack
RedOrbit The sudden onset of an asthma attack can be a frightening event. Asthmatics often experience a severe shortness of breath combined with coughing or wheezing and a tightening sensation in their lungs and chest. If you suffer from asthma, there is a … Bitter-tasting food may help ward off asthma attacks |
View full post on asthma – Google News
 Daily Mail |
Could a bitter compound provide clues about how to treat asthma?
Boston.com (blog) Even more bizarre, scientists found them in cells that line the airway, and in the muscles that contract during an asthma attack. Basic scientific research began to suggest that bitter chemicals had potential as a new class of asthma treatment. That's … How foods that leave a bitter taste in the mouth could prevent asthma attacks UMMS scientists discover new mechanisms for relaxing airways using bitter … New mechanism for relaxing airways using bitter tasting substances |
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 Health Newstrack |
ATS: What's Bitter to Taste Might Ease Tight Airways
MedPage Today DENVER — What's bitter on the tongue may be sweet relief to people suffering from asthma and COPD, a researcher said here. A wide-ranging analysis of genes expressed in lung tissue has … Researchers a step closer to find new class of asthma, COPD drugs Researchers move closer to identifying new class of asthma, COPD drugs Bitter May Be Better When It Comes to Bronchodilation |
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Bitter Better For Your Asthma
About – News & Issues Bitter foods may one day be useful as an asthma treatment according to research presented at the 2011 meeting of the American Thoracic Society. The bitter tasting compounds tested were as good as or better than … |
View full post on asthma – Google News
HealthDay – SUNDAY, Oct. 24 (HealthDay News) — Bitter taste receptors are located
in the lungs as well as on the tongue, a finding that might lead to
improved treatments for asthma and other obstructive lung diseases,
according to researchers at the University of Maryland School of Medicine
in Baltimore.
View full post on Yahoo! News: Health News
Taste receptors found in lungs a discovery that could transform asthma treatment says report
ABC Science Online is reporting that experiments found stimulating the receptors in the lungs with bitter substances decreased airway obstruction.
In a discovery that could transform asthma treatment, US researchers have found our lungs carry receptors for bitter tastes.
The receptors are the same as those that cluster together as taste-buds on our tongue, Deepak Deshpande from the University of Maryland and colleagues reported in the journal Nature Medicine.
In experiments using human and mouse lung tissue and mice with asthma, they found stimulating these receptors in the lungs with bitter substances decreased airway obstruction.
Airway obstruction is a problem in diseases such as asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, which affect some 300 million people worldwide.
“They all opened the airway more extensively than any known drug that we have for treatment of asthma or chronic obstructive pulmonary disease,” says co-author Stephen Liggett.
These results came as a surprise to the scientists, who had expected bitter substances to constrict the airways rather than open them.
“I initially thought the bitter-taste receptors in the lungs would prompt a ‘fight or flight’ response to a noxious inhalant, causing chest tightness and coughing so you would leave the toxic environment, but that’s not what we found,” says Liggett.
There are thousands of non-toxic, bitter compounds that are known to activate these receptors, the scientists say. They include natural plant substances and some synthetic agents.
In their experiments, the researchers tested bitter compounds such as quinine and chloroquine that have been used to treat malaria.
But the researchers say that simply eating bitter foods would not help the treatment of asthma.
“Based on our research, we think that the best drugs would be chemical modifications of bitter compounds, which would be aerosolized and then inhaled into the lungs with an inhaler,” Liggett said.