How does asthma work?

Do you know around 300 million suffer from asthma attacks and each year 250,000 people die from it each year, scary isn’t it? In this article, we will be helping you in familiarizing with the word asthma, the causes, the symptoms and effects of it.

Contents

Symptoms Of Asthma

The following are the symptoms of asthma attack:-

Cough
Wheeze
Chest feeling tighter
Speeding in the breath and getting shallower
Feeling like the person is running out of air

Effect Of Asthma

The system of the body that gets affected by asthma is the respirator system in smaller airways for instance, the bronchi and the bronchioles. The airways have inner lining such as the mucosa that is surrounded by a layer of smooth muscle.

Since, the people who suffer from asthma have chronically inflamed airways thus making them vulnerable to some particular triggers. Some of these triggers are:-

Smoking tobacco
Dust
Stress
Exercise
Fragrances

Exposure to these triggers can cause asthma attacks in people.

Everyday Factors Leading To Asthma Attack

When an asthmatic person gets exposed to a trigger, the smooth rings of muscle that encircle the airways in their lungs become narrow by contraction. After this, the trigger causes swelling in the mucosal lining thus secreting more mucus.

Unlike other situations where this mucus is used to get rid of dust, in an asthma attack the narrowed airways get blocked thus increasing the problem of breathing normally. These excess mucus and increase in the inflammation can cause coughing.

Hyperinflation- It is a phenomenon that takes place when in an asthmatic situation it becomes harder to exhale than inhale leading to an excess air in the lungs. Thus when the air gets trapped in the body, it becomes harder for the movement of air both inside out and outside in. This phenomenon thus results in the decrease of the oxygen delivery to the body.

There are situations when these asthma attacks are untreated that leads to the death of that certain person.

Inhalers

Prevention from severe asthma attacks can be controlled by lessening the exposure of triggers which are not fully humanly controllable. But that is where the inhalers come into play.

Inhalers are the tools that help the prevention and exposure of the triggers that can cause asthma. Through a liquid mist, inhalers just treat the problem at its source by transporting the necessary medications along the affected airways.

Type of inhalers

There are two types of inhalers

Reliever medications- These inhalers treat symptoms immediately
Preventive medications- Here asthma symptoms are treated in the long term course. These also prevent any kind of long term damage.

It is believed that the combination of genetic environmental factors cause asthma and we as humans have come a long way in curing asthma to a certain limit.