Bronchial thermoplasty for Asthma

Overview
Bronchial thermoplasty is a procedure that opens the airways to treat symptoms of severe persistent asthma. Bronchial thermoplasty uses thermal to shrink the smooth muscles that control your airways. With reduced muscle, your airways are less likely to narrow and swell and produce extra mucus, so asthma symptoms improve.

What does it involve?
The procedure is performed under sedation without an incision. A flexible tube known as a bronchoscope is inserted through your mouth or nose and threaded into the lungs. A small catheter on the tip of the tube expands to reach the walls of the affected airways, and thermal energy is released to reduce the amount of smooth muscle. This takes about an hour, and most people require three procedures.

Bronchial thermoplasty is usually performed as an outpatient procedure — you will be monitored for a few hours after the surgery and then sent home.

Constraints
Asthma symptoms may temporarily worsen after bronchial thermoplasty. Most of the time this occurs the day after the procedure and goes away on its own. If symptoms worsen enough, you may be hospitalized overnight for monitoring.

For more details about this treatment, visit:

Bronchial Thermoplasty — Yale Center for Asthma and Airway Disease
https://medicine.yale.edu/intmed/pulmonary/ycaa...