What Is Asthma?

IF SOMEONE IN YOUR FAMILY SUFFERS FROM ASTHMA, YOU PROBABLY have had the frightening experience of witnessing an asthma attack. Your child or spouse may begin to appear apprehensive and restless and may cough with each breath. Wheezing typically follows, beginning as a slight whistling sound with each exhalation and progressing to a noticeably shrill noise as your family member struggles to fill his or her lungs with air. Breathing usually becomes faster, and the sufferer appears to labor for each breath, perhaps sucking in so hard to fill the lungs that the chest appears concave. This sucking in of the chest (called retraction) occurs when a person with asthma cannot draw air into his or her lungs quickly enough. (It is most easily seen in children, who have small, flexible chests.)

While these symptoms are frightening for the observer who does not suffer from asthma, they are downright terrifying for the person with asthma who has not yet learned to control and live with the disease. People with asthma describe an attack as being choked for air. When recalling early attacks, asthma sufferers often tell of the panic they felt having to work consciously to perform something that is regularly done effortlessly: breathing.

In order to experience what breathing may be like for your family member with asthma, try this test. Begin by running in place for two minutes. Then, while pinching your nose, try breathing in enough air through a straw placed in your mouth. If you have trouble getting enough air through the narrow opening of the straw, you are simulating an asthma attack. And just as you can take the straw out of your mouth and breathe normally, better understanding of asthma and new therapies to treat the disease can allow people with asthma to breathe normally.

Asthma sufferers and their families do not have to live with regular attacks of wheezing and fright. By learning to control their disease most People with asthma affects and changes normally operating lungs, people with asthma and their families can identify the signs of an asthma attack and know when to intervene early with medications to cut short an attack.

THE EIGHT SIGNS OF ASTHMA TROUBLE

1. Wheezing, beginning as a slight whistling sound and progressing to a noticeably shrill noise with each labored breath.
2. Coughing that gets worse over minutes to hours.
3. Chest skin is sucked in. In a phenomenon known as retraction, a person with asthma struggles so hard for air that the chest may appear concave and the ribs may show.
4.  Breathing out takes longer than inhaling
5.  Breathing is faster as a person with asthma fights to get enough oxygen
6. Blue nails and lips, especially in children.
7. Sudden anxiety and apprehension. Especially in children.
8. Shortness of breath.