Managing Your Asthma
About 17 million Americans have asthma. Nearly five million of them are children. Many children outgrow asthma in their teen years. Each year, 5000 people die from asthma.Asthma is a disease of the lung airways. The airways get swollen and inflamed. They react easily to certain things, like viruses, smoke, or pollen. When the inflamed airways react, they get narrow. This makes it hard to breathe.
Many things may start or worsen an asthma attack including:
* Being exposed to allergens (dust mites, cockroaches, etc)
* Viral infections of the lungs and airways
* Tobacco smoke and certain outside pollutants (chemicals or dirt in the air)
* Exercise
Asthma is a chronic inflammatory disease of the airways, characterized by coughing, wheezing, chest tightness, and difficult breathing. Asthma is classified into five groups based on severity: exercise-induced asthma (exercise-induced bronchospasm), mild intermittent asthma, mild persistent asthma, moderate persistent asthma, severe persistent asthma.
Managing Your Asthma
Because symptoms may vary from week to week or month to month, a key part of managing your asthma is to assess your symptoms over time. When you visit your doctor for a checkup, he or she gets a snapshot of the severity of your asthma based on how you are doing at that moment. What the doctor needs is more like a motion picture, based on your experiences with asthma 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
Care
Most of the time you can care for yourself at home. But if medicine fails to improve your breathing, you must be treated in the emergency department or in the hospital. While there, you may need oxygen, medicine, and breathing treatments.
Prognosis
Although asthma cannot be cured, it almost always can be controlled successfully. Most people who have asthma can expect to lead relatively normal lives.
