Reported by: Wijdan Middle East correspondent.

The ability to detect flavor of a substance is called taste and is one of the five traditional senses of a human being. Tastes are of four main types; sweet, sour, bitter and salty. A universal or a basic type of taste which is just recently recognized is called Umami, it is referred to as savoriness and it is a Japanese word meaning good taste or good flavor.

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Human receives signals for particular type of taste through receptors called as taste buds located on the upper surface of the tongue and the message from the taste buds is transported to the brain which than decides about the type of the taste. If a person lacks taste buds, he will not be able to differentiate between different types of foods and thus half of the charm of life will be lost in an instance.

A recent study showed that just like tongue, human lungs also contain taste receptors; the difference between the two is that the taste buds in lungs are not found in clusters, are only equipped to receive bitter taste and they do not send neural impulse to the brain to like the taste receptors on tongue.

Lungs are the essential breathing organs in human beings; they are always in a form of a pair. The drawing and expulsion of air in lungs is carried out by muscular action. Although there is a pair in human body, if one lung fails, the other can keep a person alive but his movement and activities will be greatly restricted. There are many diseases that cause harm to human lungs but the most common of them all is asthma, also known as chronic inflammatory disease of the airways. The symptoms of asthma include continuous course whistling sound, coughing, chest tightness and shortness of breath.

This new research at the Maryland School of Medicine in Baltimore, discovering taste receptors in lungs will give asthma patients a new and improved way of easing up the pain. The senior author of the study Stephen Liggett, professor of medicine and physiology, said that the discovery was accidental and unexpected and was made during an unrelated study of human lung muscle receptors that regulate the airway contraction and relaxation.

Professor Liggett said that the anticipation regarding exposure to bitter taste was that the lungs will respond by producing chest tightness and coughing to remove the toxic taste and smell but the results were exactly opposite and airways were opened up more strongly than by any known drug used for the treatment of asthma.

Professor Liggett advised that treatment can only be administered by an experienced medical specialist in an aerosolized form and eating bitter foods or compounds can not help in this respect.

Asthma and other chronic obstructive pulmonary disease affect 300 million people worldwide and the finding of the research is published online in journal of natural medicines.

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