Dr. Lisa Kopas Featured in the Houston Chronicle About a New Treatment for Severe Asthma
New treatment offers hope for people with severe asthma
A little heat is changing the lives of people who have severe asthma.
A new medical procedure, bronchial thermoplasty, uses radio-frequency energy (which generates heat) to destroy the excess muscle that constricts the airways in asthmatic lungs. The procedure, approved by the FDA in 2010, is just starting to become an option for patients across the country, including in Houston. And many of those patients now can do things they couldn’t do before: Be active, take less medicine and breathe easily.
Harvey’s doctor, Houston pulmonologist Lisa Kopas, first learned of the procedure about five years ago, when it was initially being tested on humans. The more she learned, the more she believed it might be helpful to her patients. So Kopas urged her office, Pulmonary Critical Care and Sleep Medicine Consultants, to invest in equipment and training. Since last fall, she has performed a handful of bronchial thermoplasties at St. Luke’s Episcopal Hospital.
