Ginseng

Radix Ginseng (the root) is Ren Shen in Chinese Traditional Medicine (TCM).

Dan Bensky and Andrew Gamble in “Materia Medica” in an extensive listing, say it is,

“sweet, slightly bitter, slightly warm” and is one of the “herbs that tonify the Qi”.  It is contraindicated “in cases of yin deficiency with heat signs, heat excess, or in the absence of significant qi deficiency … also contraindicated for hypertensive patients with ascendant liver yang and in cases of very high blood pressure.”

Siberian ginseng is classified as an “Adaptogen and Tonic”(Menzies-Trull in "The Herbalist's Prescriber").

“Anti-depressive, increases resistance and improves both physical and mental performance… it will raise lowered blood pressure to a normal level… it can be used in general for exhaustion states and weakness.” (David Hoffman in “The New Holistic Herbal”).

Unani Tibb: For, amongst other things, “digestion, stimulate malfunctioning endocrine glands and is a powerful antispasmodic in diseases such as asthma” (Robert Thomson, in “The Grosset Encyclopedia of Natural Medicine” (1980).

Obesity and Lung Function

An October 2019 study by Sir Charles Gairdner Hospital in Perth, Western Australia, the University of Western and Australia European Respiratory Society studied, "the structure of the airways within our lungs and how these are altered in people with respiratory disease.”

Looking at samples of lung they, “spotted fatty tissue that had built up in the airway walls. We wanted to see if this accumulation was correlated with body weight."

The lead researcher said: "Being overweight or obese has already been linked to having asthma or having worse asthma symptoms. Researchers have suggested that the link might be explained by the direct pressure of excess weight on the lungs or by a general increase in inflammation created by excess weight.”

"This study suggests that another mechanism is also at play. We've found that excess fat accumulates in the airway walls where it takes up space and seems to increase inflammation within the lungs. We think this is causing a thickening of the airways that limits the flow of air in and out of the lungs, and that could at least partly explain an increase in asthma symptoms."

The team are looking for new ways to study and measure fatty tissue in the lungs. They want to confirm the relationship with respiratory disease and to find out whether the effect can be reversed by weight loss therapy.

Professor Thierry Troosters said, "This is an important finding on the relationship between body weight and respiratory disease because it shows how being overweight or obese might be making symptoms worse for people with asthma. This goes beyond the simple observation that patients with obesity need to breathe more with activity and exercise hence adding to their ventilatory burden. The observation points at true airway changes that are associated with obesity.”

New Asthma Treatments

A July 2019 study by Rutgers University found, [EurekaNews]

“inducing a second asthmatic trigger during a bronchial spasm at a precise time will actually cause the smooth muscle to relax and stop the spasm.”

The researchers said,  "[a] microdevice allowed us to drill down into how single cells interact with each other in relation to smooth muscle contraction in a variety of lung diseases …Being able to study the mechanics on the single-cell level and view thousands of cells simultaneously can be an important screening tool for the development of new drugs for people with asthma who don't respond to current treatment."