While no two people experience asthma exactly the same way, your symptoms may be similar to others who also have this condition. Left untreated, asthma symptoms can worsen, leading to a potentially life-threatening asthma episode. It’s up to you to learn the symptoms of asthma, and even more important, to know what they can mean for your health.

Common asthma symptoms

• Shortness of breath. You may have experienced the same feeling after exercising, or at high altitudes. During an asthma episode, the muscle bands surrounding the airway tighten and swell, limiting the amount of air entering and leaving your lungs. As a result, breathing can become rapid and shallow, like panting.
• Tightness in the chest. No matter how hard you try to exhale, your muscles don’t seem to respond. Your body normally responds to an irritant by relaxing, breathing in deeply, then forcing a high volume of air — and the irritant — out of your lungs. But if you have asthma, the airways tighten instead.
• Wheezing. This difficult breathing is the result of air trying to move through tight and swollen airways. It can sound like you’re breathing through a straw.
• Chronic cough. Coughing is your body’s normal way of clearing mucus out of the airways. If you have asthma, your body keeps producing mucus as fast as you can cough it out.

Allergies, a cold, or asthma?

Your immune system handles allergies, colds, and asthma in similar ways. According to researchers from the University of Manitoba in Canada, pollen allergy and asthma are related both physiologically (how the body reacts) and therapeutically (how the symptoms are treated). In fact, the two are so closely aligned that the lead researcher for the Manitoba study suggests that the medical community should consider adopting a new term, allergic rhinobronchitis, to describe the relationship.

What about that lingering cold that won’t go away? A University of Wisconsin study on the relationship between colds and asthma showed that when you have asthma, your body continues to behave as though the cold virus were present for weeks after exposure. Study authors suggested that as many as 44% of adult asthma episodes begin with a rhinovirus infection — the common cold.

What to do about symptoms

Managing a full, active lifestyle is well within reach of people with asthma — when they are diagnosed and treated for their condition. With proper management, your symptoms should become less severe and the risk of an asthma episode less likely. If you’ve experienced any asthma symptoms on an ongoing basis, call your health care provider to find out why.

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 15th, 2007 at 6:48 am and is filed under Adult Asthma. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.