Asthma in Women
Asthma in Pregnancy
Definition and Causes of Asthma
Twenty percent of the U.S. population has allergies or asthma (6).
Asthma is a
disease of chronic inflammation of the airways (the tubes bringing air to the
lungs). The inflammation makes breathing difficult. How
asthma affects a person fluctuates with a person's various environmental and
medical conditions. Asthma can be life-threatening. It is not contagious.
Symptoms can start at any age.
Asthma is defined as a chronic
inflammatory disease of the airways (2), the airways being the tubes in the
lungs that bring in critical supplies of oxygen from the air into the body. It
is included in one of the two major categories lung diseases called obstructive
lung diseases, also included is chronic obstructive pulmonary disease usually caused by smoking. These obstructive lung
diseases are conditions in which the air can come in, but the exit of air,
called expiration, is impaired, in other words obstructed or blocked. The cause
of this blockage is usually narrowed airways and increased mucus.
In asthma, a person's lungs react
excessively to many triggers (stimuli). Frequently, an asthmatic person is also
allergic, and the allergic trigger is the cause of an asthma attack. Other
causes of asthma attacks (also called exacerbations) include smoking,
environmental pollution, exercise, and upper respiratory infections, such as the common cold or bronchitis. Viral infections are
being increasingly recognized as major triggers of asthma attacks. These
infections may be found in the future to be even more important than other
asthma triggers. Although the attacks can last for only minutes before
resolving, sometimes acute asthma exacerbations last for days or weeks. They can
even be fatal.
It is becoming
more and more clear that asthma and gastroesophageal reflux
can often occur in the same person. Gastroesophageal reflux is a
condition of irritation and inflammation of the esophagus due to contact of the
stomach
contents with the lining of the esophagus. Although the cause and effect of how
asthma and reflux are related are blurry, in terms of which one triggers the
other, when the two conditions (not infrequently) occur in the same person they
can trigger each other.
There may be genetic component to asthma, meaning that the
built-in messages physically passed on from birth from our parents may play a
role. It has long been observed that asthma sometimes "runs in families".
Already genes
causing susceptibility to asthma in such families are being discovered.
Asthma can occur in
pregnancy and requires very close monitoring during that time. Asthma can even
begin during pregnancy. Three to five percent of all pregnant women have asthma (11).
The Magnitude of the
Problem
Asthma is responsible for:
- Restricted days - over 100 millions days annually)
- Huge costs - total annual costs of $6.2 billion
- Deaths - 5,000 asthma-related deaths in the U.S. each year
The National Asthma Education and Prevention Program
(NAEPP) started in 1989 with the goal of raising awareness about the seriousness
of asthma as a chronic disease, as well as improving recognition of symptoms of
asthma by doctors and the public. The NAEPP is run by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute.
Statistics about asthma, including those above, can be obtained from the NAEPP.
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