Asthma: What You Should Know

The statistical data show that in the United States of America about 18 million citizens are down with asthma. The funds appropriated for the diseases, related to allergic illnesses, amount to nearly seven milliard dollars per annum in the USA. There are great many of affected patients who require an urgent treatment, and approximately 500,000 asthmatics are to be admitted to the hospital on an emergency basis every year. The children under the age of eighteen years old average almost 50% of all emergency department visits. If ignored such diseases as asthma have the tendency of exacerbation. The influence of acute severe asthma in children is the most frequent reason for urgent hospitalization as compared to other chronic diseases of respiratory system. That forces children and their parents to be absent at school and work place very often.
Now let’s make it clear what generally asthma is. Asthma is a kind of physical impairment, to be more precise it is a disorder occasioned by allergic inflammation in bronchi (breathing passages), which lead the air to the lungs. Therefore the respiratory tracks become tightened and narrow that restricts normal breathing and thus causes lack of oxygen in the organism. Typical signs of the disease are the following: wheezing and dyspnea (breathlessness); coughing and pain in the chest, especially at night (nocturnal asthma) or after physical activity. This inflammation in the respiratory apparatus can also be fully or incompletely reversed by means of medicaments. So the regular professional examination is a must for an asthmatic.
The inflammation of the breathing passages accounts for airways’ high-grade sensitivity (bronchial hyperresponsiveness) to the exogenous irritants that causes smother. Children’s bronchi are especially hyperreactive to asthma triggers since their immune system is very weak. Different individuals may have different reactions to the same triggers. Thus we may enumerate here such general irritants and triggers as physical exercises, allergic reactions, different virus infections and of course cigarette smoke. Asthmatic individuals, who are susceptible to these triggers, run constant risk to have their airways swelled and filled up with mucus (protective liquid). The muscles around the bronchi are also tightened and therewith obstruct the air flow even more.
The physicians have agreed that the airways inflammation, the afflux of mucus and bronchoconstriction are the most important characteristic changes in the respiratory organs that restrict normal breathing during asthma outset.
Regardless of the age such disease as asthma may develop in both adults and children. Along with acquired there is also inherited asthma, which means that such disease may run in families.