Breathe Easy

Inova Fairfax Hospital is among the first hospitals in the DC area offering a new procedure that helps patients with severe asthma. The procedure is bronchial thermoplasty; it uses mild heat to reduce excess smooth muscle tissue in the patient’s airway so that the airway has less capacity to constrict. This reduces wheezing, shortness of breath and chest tightness.

“It’s a cutting-edge procedure that really has the potential to help a lot of people who in the past have been reliant on daily inhalers, oral medications like Singulair, or, in the worst-case scenario, daily doses of prednisone,” says Mark Granada, MD, pulmonologist at Inova Fairfax Hospital. “We’ve just never had anything like this in asthma before. There’s a lot of promise to it.”

The treatment is an outpatient procedure that takes place over the course of three months, during which time the patient receives a total of three treatments. While the results of the treatment often start appearing after the third treatment, Dr. Granada has seen patients who report breathing easier while they are still in the treatment phase.

Dr. Granada explained that Inova’s commitment to its patients is what brought this unique technology to the hospital.

“I think Inova was very proactive in trying to get this procedure,” he says. “One of the things that was impressive is they really took a hard look at the data and by committee decided this procedure had the potential to really help asthmatics.”

Take A Breath

To learn more about bronchial thermoplasty, please contact your physician or call 703.641.8616.