Overview
- The peer-reviewed work by Swarnaditya Hazra and Professor Jason R. Picardo appears in the Journal of Fluid Mechanics and focuses on the lung’s middle airways.
- Increasing mucus volume was found to create deeper but narrower, ring-like humps, expanding mucus-depleted zones rather than improving coverage.
- The pattern leaves airway walls vulnerable to submicron soot and allergens that deposit by diffusion, a mechanism that could help explain rapid-onset asthma flare-ups in polluted cities.
- The researchers first predicted the effect using mathematical theory and then confirmed it through computer simulations, which also mapped where particles of different sizes tend to land.
- The study suggests opportunities to better target inhaled drugs and notes risks such as airway plugging, with the authors calling for biological and clinical validation before changing practice.