1. What is Asthma?
Asthma is a common and a chronic disease that causes your airways to become inflamed, making it hard to breathe. More than 300 million people are suffering from this disease worldwide. More than 5 % of the population is expected to be suffering from this disease.
2. What are the signs & symptoms of Asthma?
It is important to know the signs and symptoms and they are -
3. What are the triggers of Asthma?
Asthma trigger is something you are sensitive to that makes your airways become inflamed. Some of the most common asthma triggers are -
4. How is Asthma diagnosed?
Asthma can be diagnosed in different ways. One is most commonly by the symptoms itself. Then the gold standard for diagnosis is “Spirometry”, which is a test where the lung functions are assessed to see if there is any air flow limitation. The test simply checks how well your lungs work by measuring how much air you inhale, how much you exhale and how quickly you exhale. So the patient is asked to blow into an equipment in a particular way and the rate at which the air is blown helps to know if there is any obstruction in the airways or not. Once diagnosed, the patient is prescribed medicine to see if there is any response and if there is a significance response, the doctors take it to be Bronchial Asthma.
5. Is Asthma a curable disease?
Asthma can be controlled but not cured. The patient has to take drugs regularly and but if they have a good control over their asthma, it may go into remission keeping in mind to stay away from its triggers to stop the disease from relapsing.
6. How can Asthma be controlled?
Asthma is controlled through various pharmacological interventions. Some of the most common medicine used is inhale drugs and they are inhaled corticosteroids which are used to control the disease. There are other medicines which are used to dilate the airways also delivered through the inhale route in the form of inhalers, dry powder inhalers or nebulized aerosols. Even oral and injectable medicines are available to control the disease.
7. Is Asthma hereditary?
Asthma can be a hereditary disease. Some patients are found with other siblings having the same disease but it is not necessary that if one of the parents has asthma everyone in the family will have it too. So there is a genetic link, it’s basically a disease in which the airways are hyper reactive and this can be genetically inherited.
8. How can a patient avoid Asthma attacks?
One of the most important things for Asthma patient is that they should strictly adhere to prescriptions prescribed by the doctors, in order to keep the disease in a good control and avoid the attacks.
9. Can Asthma patient exercise?
Yes, they can exercise and do all the normal activities as any other human beings. In fact, they should be encouraged to do it. We can see many athletes participating in competitions all over the world who are “Asthmatics”, who take their medicine regularly and some of them also require rescue medicine but they are allowed to take part tournaments. So there should be no restriction in physical activities.
10. Is it true that stress can lead to Asthma?
Stress is one of the major triggers of Asthma. Emotional conditions such as anxiety, depression so it’s important for the patient to have a good healthy mind to control the disease.
