Can Warm, Humidified High-Flow Filtered Air Therapy Be Protective Against Severe Infection from Sars-Cov-2 and Other Respiratory Pathogens? |Biomedgrid

The scientific article “Impact of surfactant protein-A variants on survival in aged mice in response to Klebsiella pneumoniae infection and ozone: serendipity in action” [1] investigated the effect of infection and oxidative stress, along with the impact of surfactant protein A (SP-A) genetic variants on the survival of aged mice. This study, along with a prior study [2] investigating survival after infection in young mice, compared survival among humanized transgenic expressing each a different human SP-A variant (6A2, 6A4, 1A0, 1A3, KO). The aged mice were first exposed to either ozone (a surrogate for pollution-induced lung injury) delivered via a high flow of warmed humidified filtered air (FA) or high flow of warmed humidified FA or room air, with the latter two serving as controls for ozone exposure. The young mice were exposed to high flow of warmed humidified FA or room air. Next, all the mice were exposed to oropharyngeal Klebsiella pneumoniae. As expected, the mice exposed to ozone and infection had lower survival compared to the two controls.