Is the nose finally going to pass?

After fighting with allergic rhinitis for hundreds of years, mankind finally saw the dawn of curing it.

On May 24, 2019, scientists from the VIB Inflammation Research Center in Belgium published a paper on Science. They found the microscopic causes of many respiratory inflammations, including allergic rhinitis and asthma.

In the face of such diseases for which there is no cure, the only option for patients is to hide. Even under the most poisonous summer sun, many people still have to wear heavy masks and goggles-not to avoid smog, but to avoid allergies that may arise from unknown causes.

They can only enjoy a little free breathing in winter and early spring. Since the late spring season, catkins, pollen and seeds of various plants have come one after another. The threat may also come from small animals that pass by when going out for a walk...

According to investigations and estimates by the Allergy Branch of the Chinese Medical Association and Beijing Tongren Hospital, the number of patients with allergic rhinitis in China exceeds 100 million. In urban and rural areas, the incidence of allergic rhinitis is about 7.2% and 6.2%, respectively.

In the medical concept, "allergic reaction" refers to the overreaction of the immune system leading to tissue damage or dysfunction. Allergic rhinitis is a typical "allergic reaction." Every patient can feel bitter about the "abnormal" taste when rhinitis attacks. "All night, I kept blowing my nose, my eyes, ears, and throat were itchy and crazy. 3 packs of tissues, a total of 1,200 pumps, were not enough, and my nose was no longer my own." Someone described his latest illness on social platforms. Feelings.

If not treated in time, allergic rhinitis may develop into asthma and become a time bomb that may be life-threatening at any time. Singer Teresa Teng and Peking Opera master Mei Baojiu both died of asthma.

A survey conducted by the Allergy Department of Peking Union Medical College Hospital showed that 47% of summer and autumn hay fever patients will develop seasonal asthma within 9 years. The World Health Organization estimates that about 300 million people worldwide suffer from asthma, of which more than 50% of adult patients and at least 80% of children with asthma are induced by allergic factors, and more than 250,000 people die of asthma each year. In recent years, medicine has gradually begun to use the diagnostic term "allergic rhinitis-asthma syndrome".

This group of Belgian scientists discovered that although the allergens that cause this disease in different people are different, at the microscopic level, allergic reactions and inflammation are caused by protein crystals called CLCs. After exposure to allergens, human cells will produce CLCs, which will make people "perverted."

As early as 1853, Charcot, a curious doctor in Paris, discovered such crystals. After handling many asthma patients, he collected the sputum of the patients and found that in each patient's sputum, there was a crystal with two pointed ends and a hexagonal bottom. A bunch of these little things lie on the mucous membrane of a person's respiratory tract, which makes it itchy to think about it.

Twenty years later, another doctor, Leyden, made the same discovery, but CLCs were not observed in the sputum of healthy people. But people at that time thought that this was a crystallization of some kind of inorganic substance. It was not until around 1950 that scientists knew that CLCs were a kind of protein crystallization.

In the human body, protein is usually dissolved in the cell sap and rarely appears in solid form. This condition often means a certain condition. For example, in the joints of gout patients, uric acid forms crystals, causing pain. In atherosclerotic plaques, cholesterol crystals are usually observed.

In addition to asthma, people have also found CLCs in inflammatory diseases such as bronchitis, sinusitis, and allergic rhinitis. What these diseases have in common is that mucus often blocks the respiratory tract, and the number of immune cells called eosinophils increases significantly.

"Every doctor today knows the name of CLCs during training, knows that these crystals are related to eosinophils, and knows that they are often found in the sputum of patients with asthma." Bart Lan, the corresponding author of the Belgian study Brett (Bart Lambrecht) told the media.

However, no one knows why these crystals appear there, what effect they have, and how they are related to allergic inflammation of the respiratory tract. Many people have speculated that CLCs are related to asthma, but this group of Belgian scientists were the first to design experiments to verify this conclusion and solved this mystery that has plagued humans for 160 years.

No one knows exactly who discovered the disease of rhinitis in the first place. The ancient Roman scholar Kersus described the characteristics of nasal inflammation in "Medical Art" more than 2000 years ago. Almost at the same period, the "Huangdi Nei Jing" wrote "Shaoyin Sitian, the guest wins the sneeze", "sneezes" is rhinitis, and the related content points out the etiology of rhinitis in the theory of traditional Chinese medicine.

In order to combat this disease, scientists have tried from many angles. Some people have found that respiratory tract inflammation such as asthma seems to often occur in the same family. The research on the genetic basis of this disease lasted from 1916 to 1997. After the implementation of the Human Genome Project, the Asthma Genetics Collaborative Research Group located about 80 relevant gene loci.

Some people are also trying to find the correlation between allergic rhinitis and skin allergies, tonsill diseases, cataracts, glaucoma and other diseases or obesity, osteoporosis and other physiological conditions. Some people have found through research that allergic rhinitis is closely related to the use of pesticides and the degree of local greening. .

But so far, there is no cure for allergic rhinitis and asthma. Many people don't even know what is the root cause of the body's "allergic reaction". Doctors often tell patients to stay away from allergens, but after many people have been screened for hundreds of allergens in the hospital, they receive the test results of "unknown allergens". In order to avoid rhinitis, some people wash the respiratory tract with salt water every day, and some even choose a folk remedy, dripping the thick white juice squeezed out of fresh green onion leaves into the nostrils.

In the past 10 years, the outpatient volume of the Allergy Department of Union Hospital has increased by about 50%. Statistics from the World Health Organization show that in the past 30 years, the prevalence of allergic diseases has increased by at least three times, involving 22% of the world's population, and allergic diseases have become the sixth largest disease in the world.

The dawn of healing should not come too late. Scholars from the Belgian VIB Inflammation Research Center have found a way to dissolve CLCs crystals and have successfully experimented on mice. After using this therapy, the inflammation in the lungs of the mice was suppressed, and the mucus produced was also significantly reduced.

"Given that there are no drugs specifically targeting mucus accumulation in the respiratory tract, this therapy may change the rules of the game for treating this disease," Lambret said.