Anne Ross knew her long suffering with sinus problems was over when she stepped outside her Grovetown home and smelled her beloved tea olive trees.
"That is one of the most wonderful things I have had," said Mrs. Ross, 69, who had chronic sinusitis for about 10 years.
Chronic sinusitis is an inflammation in the sinuses, and it is one of the most common chronic health problems in the United States, affecting more than 30 million adults, according to the National Center for Health Statistics at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Chronic sinusitis involves sinus problems that last more than 12 weeks and, as with Mrs. Ross, can linger for years, according to the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
But treating these problems is often difficult, the institute said. In fact, there is no single treatment or drug approved specifically to treat chronic sinusitis by the Food and Drug Administration, said Stil Kountakis, the director of the Georgia Sinus Center and chief of rhinology-sinus surgery at Medical College of Georgia.
"So everything that we do is basically voodoo," he said. "It is not approved by the FDA."
The problem is that chronic sinusitis does not have just one cause and is in fact not just one disease, Dr. Kountakis said.
"It is a spectrum of diseases," he said. "Two people may look alike in the office, but they may have different underlying causes of their sinusitis."
It is difficult even to classify the severity of chronic sinusitis, let alone come up with standard treatments, Dr. Kountakis said. Some patients can be managed with medications such as oral steroids or steroid sprays, but others require surgery to reopen the sinuses and could need medication after that. Being able to identify those who will need ongoing treatment would be crucial, Dr. Kountakis said.
To that end, he took samples from 96 chronic sinusitis patients and 38 people without the disease and ran them through time-of-flight mass spectrometry, which creates a protein profile of each patient. The findings are published in the March-April issue of the American Journal of Rhinology .
The method could effectively tell chronic sinusitis patients from the other samples by the kinds of proteins they had. Interestingly, Dr. Kountakis said, the process uncovered a protein unique to those patients, though it has yet to be identified.
"That gives us a location where we can go to do more research and possibly identify that protein marker," he said.
More importantly, it gives them a more objective way of telling what kind of disease the patient has and potentially what kind of treatment will be most successful with that particular form of sinusitis, Dr. Kountakis said.
"There's a difference in the disease with type A therapy vs. type B therapy, because now you have a totally objective way of evaluating this," he said.
It was that kind of roller-coaster, trying one thing, then another, that Mrs. Ross found herself on. Since her last surgery with Dr. Kountakis, however, her sinuses have stayed clear.
"From that point on it has been heaven on earth," she said, laughing. And to her, heaven smells like tea olive trees.
Reach Tom Corwin at (706) 823-3213 or tom.corwin@augustachronicle.com.
The Augusta Chronicle ©2012. All Rights Reserved.
