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The Relation of Sputum Bacteria to Asthma¹

From Harvard Medical School and the Medical Clinic of the Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, Mass.

Abstract

It is now recognized that asthma is a symptom complex which depends on one or the other of two great groups of causes: either the cause is a foreign protein which exerts its influence from outside the body—"extrinsic"—or it produces its effect from some focus, usually of bacterial growth and action within the body—"intrinsic."

The treatment of this last group consists either in eradicating the focus by surgical means if possible or in the use of bacterial vaccines made preferably from the same strains which are causing the focus of infection or finally by surgery and vaccination together.

Inasmuch as the search for a "focus" is usually futile, it is assumed that a chronic infection of the bronchi is responsible for the asthma and vaccines are prepared from the sputum bacteria.

Treatment with such vaccines has been used with success by several workers.

Footnotes

¹ Read at the meeting of the American Society for the Advancement of Clinical Investigation, May 3, 1920.