Improvement of fog and exercise-induced bronchoconstriction after local and subcutaneous immunotherapy in mite asthma.

ABSTRACT

We compared the changes of non-specific bronchial hyperreactivity to methacholine, UNDW and exercise in 2 groups of patients with mite asthma treated with local immunotherapy (LIT group 12 patients) and subcutaneous immunotherapy (SIT group 8 patients) for 1 year. Bronchial challenges were done 1 week before the beginning and 1 week after the end of 1 year of treatment. The results showed a reduction of bronchial hyperreactivity to methacholine in the LIT group (PD 20FEV1 before 223 +/- 193, after 434 +/- 548) but not in the SIT group (PD 20FEV1 before 143 +/- 188, after 125 +/- 121) but the difference was not statistically significant. Exercise-induced bronchoconstriction completely disappeared in all the patients of LIT group (8/8) although only in 2 out of 4 patients of SIT group. Water-induced bronchoconstriction improved in 66% of LIT group (4/6) compared with none of SIT group (0/4). We conclude that, with the protocol of the present study, LIT is able to improve, more than SIT, non-specific bronchial hyperreactivity evaluated with osmotic stimuli as exercise and UNDW but not with pharmacologic stimuli as methacholine.