We know that children develop asthma after they've had early life respiratory illnesses. We don't understand how that happens.
This is a tremendously ambitious study in Puerto Rico.
We're going to recruit 3,000 women in pregnancy.
We're going to be there at the birth of their child.
We'll follow them until age 5.
I am 22 years old.
I have cystic fibrosis.
I always wanted to get married and have kids.
Then once I started to get sicker, it started to look less and less like a reality.
I was pretty much bedridden most days.
I'm gasping.
I don't know how long this is going to last.
I'm realizing if I was to call 911 right now, they might not get here in time to save me if I stop breathing. I get a burger with no bun, and I ate it, and my mouth like immediately got itchy.
And I'm thinking, I'm having an allergic reaction. We finish our meals. I feel my throat swelling again, and I tell my mom, and she takes my EpiPen out and stabs me in the thigh, and we take a taxi to the nearest hospital.
It was like Sydney was allergic to the world.
It was not just food that was setting her off.
Pain would cause it. Stress would cause it. It didn't seem to have any rhyme or reason to it.
And suddenly this situation was totally out of our control.
All we could do was be afraid of it. I think our world became very small.
There gets to be a point when the house itself feels like a prison.
I'm stopping interacting with my friends.
I didn't want to have to go and eat dinner at somebody else's house and kind of like be away from those safe foods.
I was afraid that if I ate new foods, I would die.
So we went to National Jewish Health in Denver.
Cystic fibrosis affected every single piece of my life.
In my own house, I was scared to go up the stairs.
From June to August, my breathing capacity dropped almost in half, going from 65% to 35%.
She had gone down so low in terms of her lung function that we had to refer her for a lung transplant evaluation.
He was having more and more kind of like off days. We wouldn't even see him. It was like he'd be in the room.
There'd be a lot of wheezing. There'd be a lot of coughing. There'd be a lot of moaning. But it was definitely a struggle.
There were some near-death experiences that certainly, that's what they felt like to me. Martin has asthma and a COPD. Without controlling that, you wouldn't have been a good candidate for the surgery.
It seems paradoxical that you could take someone with bad lungs, go in, take out part of each lung and actually help them breathe better.
In fact, that's what happens in properly selected patients.
The NET trial, so this was a big deal.
We were a major site for it, really defined that right set of patients to do this procedure on.
So to be able to pick that you were the right patient and to have the surgeon do such a great job and see how amazing you look, I mean, it is truly transformational.
We've come a long way in the management of asthma, but there's still two million emergency visits for asthma every year and over 3000 people die from asthma every year in the United States.
So we still have to do a better job.
In the end, we're studying human diseases and the first thing that you want to do is go to that human population and obtain samples from those subjects and see what's different between their airway and someone that's healthy.
Puerto Rico is a population in need.
They have among the highest asthma rates in the country and in the world.
They have the highest mortality due to asthma.
They are not born with asthma.
They are born with the predisposition.
It's an opportunity to have collaboration with big people in centers like National Jewish Health.
This study is going to give us one of the first glimpses into those early life factors behind someone developing asthma.
Max Seibold's group pioneered the study of viral gene expression and now that technique is being replicated across the country, across the world.
National Jewish, they're amazing.
They've helped me through the hardest experience in my life.
The community has just kept me positive and fought for new drugs and meds and helped me find things.
They never got stuck.
National Jewish Health has by far the largest adult CF program in the country.
So we're doing over 30 research studies and we're really, really seeing a difference in what we can do for people with CF.
Hannah has been on the medication for about two months and now because her lung function is so much better and she no longer needs a transplant, she can actually probably have a baby on her own someday.
So that would be amazing because I've always wanted to have kids and I'm like this is what life is like.
I feel like I'm a free bird right now.
After this operation, he really did kind of reclaim a quality of life that he hadn't experienced for years.
When I originally moved here, I got myself a handicapped placard which I used all the time.
Since the procedure, I still have that in my car, but more often than not, when I'm
in a parking lot, I can't bring myself to use it.
I don't want to waste, I don't want to use a handicapped spot when I don't need it.
What National Jewish Health did was take her and us and her symptoms and professionally, methodically, sensitively take it one by one to try to solve each problem one at a time.
I went on a bike and I worked out for a while and then they found that the throat tightening feeling is real, but it's not life-threatening.
It was a complicated case, but we were able to peel the layers off and we found that uncontrolled asthma, reflux, vocal cord dysfunction and anxiety all contributed to her symptoms and by managing all of these individual components, we could make her feel better.
Just knowing her life actually isn't in danger was so freeing.
We are so grateful for what they did.
It was just an unbelievable stewardship through a very, very murky place.
I mean, I think we were walking on air.
It felt like the doors were opening again for us.
We go out to restaurants, we're back on family vacations, she's out there living life again and she's happy.
I can very heartily say, thank you National Jewish.
National Jewish Health.
Breathing science is life.
At National Jewish Health, breathing science is life.
