Asthma is a chronic disease that affects your airways. Your airways are tubes that carry air in and out of your lungs. If you have asthma, the inside walls of your airways become sore and swollen. That makes them very sensitive, and they may react strongly to things that you are allergic to or find irritating. When your airways react, they get narrower and your lungs get less air. This can cause wheezing, coughing, chest tightness and trouble breathing, especially early in the morning or at night.
When your asthma symptoms become worse than usual, it is called an asthma episode or attack. During an asthma attack, muscles around the airways tighten up, making the airways narrower so less air flows through. Inflammation increases, and the airways become more swollen and even narrower. Cells in the airways may also make more mucus than usual. This extra mucus also narrows the airways. These changes make it harder to breathe.
Become "twitchy" and go into spasm the muscles around your airways squeeze together and tighten. This makes your airways narrower, leaving less room for the air to pass through.
Most people with asthma have wheezing attacks separated by symptom-free periods. Some patients have long-term shortness of breath with episodes of increased shortness of breath. Still, in others, a cough may be the main symptom. Asthma attacks can last minutes to days and can become dangerous if the airflow becomes severely restricted.
Asthma is a serious, sometimes life-threatening respiratory disease that affects the quality of life for millions of Americans. Although there is no cure for asthma yet, asthma can be controlled through medical treatment and management of environmental triggers. EPA is committed to educating all Americans about asthma so that everyone knows what asthma is, how the environment can affect asthma patients and how to manage environmental asthma triggers.
A faulty immune system is the main culprit in asthma. The immune system is the body's first line of defense against disease and infection. A complex set of organs and a separate circulatory system work together to help protect your body.
Caesarean sections have been associated with asthma when compared with vaginal birth; a meta-analysis found a 20% increase in asthma prevalence in children delivered by Caesarean section compared to those who were not. It was proposed that this is due to modified bacterial exposure during Caesarean section compared with vaginal birth, which modifies the immune system.
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.
A person having an asthma flare-up may cough, wheeze (make a whistling sound while breathing), be short of breath, and feel an intense tightness in the chest. Many people with asthma compare a flare-up to the sensation of trying to breathe through a straw - it feels extremely hard to get air in and out of their lungs. An asthma flare-up can last for several hours or longer if a person doesn't use asthma medication. When an asthma flare-up is over, the person usually feels better.
Asthma flare-ups may sound a little like a cold, with coughing and wheezing, but asthma isn't contagious. You can't catch it from someone like you can catch a cold.
