Botox to help relieve asthma

Gone are the days when botox was considered a medical procedure used only to eliminate wrinkles and fine lines. The cosmetic practice now has the potential to bring a person life-saving health benefits.

Melbourne clinicians are about to start a world-first trial using the toxin to treat severe asthma conditions.

About a quarter of a million Australians have severe asthma. The clinicians now believe those people affected could in fact be suffering from two distinct manifestations of the condition – one in their lungs, and one in their voice box.

Southern Health’s director of respiratory and sleep medicine, Professor Phil Bardin, said when the researchers spoke to patients with severe asthma, they would point to their throat when describing their asthma as “very bad”.

“Through modern technology we are able to show that in people with asthma, there seems to be a similar abnormality in the voice box as is present in the lung,” Professor Bardin said.

The Monash Institute of Medical Research will trial injections of the botox brand of the botulinum toxin into a voice box muscle.

“It’s a world first and it’s using in some ways an unconventional form of treatment for very common medical condition,” Professor Bardin said.

The clinicians believe the muscles in the voice box have become dysfunctional and fallen into “bad habits” as part of the asthmatic process and possibly by compensating for the lungs.

“By resetting their movement almost, if you will, we hope that we may be able to relieve people’s symptoms,” Professor Bardin said.

The procedure involves using an ultra-thin needle, a device that detects where the needle is and injecting muscles in the voice box to temporarily paralyse those muscles. 

Professor Bardin admitted the discovery would not cure asthma, but may change the asthma from being severe, difficult to treat and disabling, to mild.

According to Professor Bardin, the usual treatment would carry low health risks.

“One of the ear, nose and throat surgeons here has done more than 400 of these injections for a comparable condition called laryngeal dystonia, where people’s voices disappear,” he said.

“So we have a good experience. From the literature it looks as though the injection doesn’t have significant problems or side effects except that people’s voices are sometimes softer as you’d sort of expect.”

The team of surgeons and neurologists are hoping just one injection, wearing off within a few weeks, will be all that is required to produce good results.