Health Articles
What Is Asthma?
Asthma is a disease that affects your lungs. It is the most common long-term disease of children, but adults have asthma, too. Asthma causes repeated episodes of wheezing, breathlessness, chest tightness, and nighttime or early morning coughing. If you have asthma, you have it all the time, but you will have asthma attacks only when something bothers your lungs.
We know that if someone in your family has asthma, you are also more likely to have it. In most cases, we don’t know what causes asthma, and we don’t know how to cure it. You can control your asthma by knowing the warning signs of an attack, staying away from things that trigger an attack, and following the advice of your healthcare provider.
Asthma can be hard to diagnose, especially in children under 5 years of age. Regular physical checkups that include checking your lung function and checking for allergies can help your healthcare provider make the right diagnosis.
A lung function test, called spirometry (spy-rom-e-tree), is another way to diagnose asthma. A spirometer (spy-rom-e-ter) measures the largest amount of air you can exhale, or breathe out, after taking a very deep breath. The spirometer can measure airflow before and after you use asthma medicine.
An asthma attack happens in your body’s airways, which are the paths that carry air to your lungs. As the air moves through your lungs, the airways become smaller, like the branches of a tree are smaller than the tree trunk. During an asthma attack, the sides of the airways in your lungs swell, and the airways shrink. Less air gets in and out of your lungs, and mucus that your body produces clogs up the airways even more. The attack may include coughing, chest tightness, wheezing, and trouble breathing. Some people call an asthma attack an “episode.”
An asthma attack can occur when you are exposed to things in the environment such as house dust mites and tobacco smoke. These are called asthma triggers. Some of the most important triggers are environmental tobacco smoke (secondhand smoke), dust mites, outdoor air pollution, cockroach allergen, pets and mold. Other triggers may include strenuous physical exercise; some medicines; bad weather such as thunderstorms, high humidity, or freezing temperatures; and some foods and food additives can trigger an asthma attack. Strong emotional states can also lead to hyperventilation and an asthma attack.
You can control your asthma and avoid an attack by taking your medicine exactly as your healthcare provider tells you to do and by avoiding things that can cause an attack.
Asthma medicines come in two types—quick-relief and long-term control. Quick-relief medicines control the symptoms of an asthma attack. Long-term control medicines help you have fewer and milder attacks, but they don’t help you if you’re having an asthma attack.
Learn what triggers your attacks so that you can avoid the triggers whenever possible and be alert for a possible attack when the triggers cannot be avoided.
Remember, you can control your asthma!
Content source: CDC/National Center for Environmental Health Division of Environmental Hazards and Health Effects
