Exercise Could Induce Asthma

Some people only seem to get asthma attacks when they run or do other types of exercise. This type of "exercise-induced asthma" is particularly a problem with young people. In fact, some physicians are puzzled over why the children have exercise-induced-asthma and why adults typically do not. Eventually the result of the research showed that adults just don’t get enough exercise to have these kinds of attacks. Now, the thought is that the people who get the asthma attacks only when they exercise just have a type of asthma that is too mild to show up a lot of them time, needing the extra provocation from breathing faster to bring it out.

Exercise, unfortunately, is only one of many things which irritate the air passages and cause asthma. This means that things which are harmless to others can trigger an asthma attack in you. Typical irritants include: cold air, tobacco smoke or other irritating inhalants, emotional stress, infections, some medications, and indigestion with stomach acid coming up into your gullet.

There are some types of exercises that are worse than others. If you take different kinds of exercises that you use the same amount of oxygen while doing each one, some will cause more tightness in the chest or wheeziness than others. For example, running outdoors will overall be worse than swimming. As a matter of fact, swimming is considered to be one of the best forms of exercise for a person that has asthma because it usually causes the least amount of chest tightness. If exercising in cold and/or dry air, your breathing is more difficult and your asthma may worsen. If it is warm air that is also moist, your asthma may not flair up as much. This generally explains why swimming causes less asthma attacks than outdoor running does. There are those, however, who have sensitivities to the chlorine fumes in pools, and for such people swimming in a chlorinated pool can be much worse than outdoor running.

For a few hours after you have experience an attack, repeating the same amount of exercise will no longer produce the same amount of the asthma symptoms, in fact, it may produce none at all. So this means you may be able to run through your exercise-induced asthma attack by either warming up with short burst of exercise, or by doing continuous exercise which does not bring on a severe asthma attack. Exercises and sports which include short bursts of activity with periods of rest in the middle can be particularly suitable when it comes to asthma sufferers. You could try relay races and team sports in which you are not running all the time.

There is also promising evidence that gradual athletic training can make you less likely to have exercise-induced-asthma. At a special school for children who suffer from asthma near Oslo in Norway, children ended up being able to do far larger amounts of exercise than they could tolerate before by completing a physical training program. Although some of their improvement may well have been due to the excellent medical care they were receiving, the physician in charge thought that the exercise training itself played a very important part in their improvement.

In fact, if you receive better treatment with medicines it can have a powerful effect on exercise-induced asthma. The better you control your asthma, the less you will have trouble with exercise induced attacks.

Exercise-induced asthma is a very good example of a condition which you can begin to solve once you can better understand it.

What is it about doing exercise that can make asthma worse? Well, the last evidence on this subject showed that the increased breathing during exercise causes cooling and drying of the lining of the air passages which causes the necessary symptoms for someone to get exercise-induced asthma. This also explains why warm moist air is best to protect against having an attack. However, nobody really knows exactly why the drying and cooling of the airway linking causes these asthma episodes.

It has also been proven that exercise-induced asthma can also be useful. I know that no one would rather have asthma no matter how useful it can be, but this type of asthma can be used to diagnose asthma in children. If a child exercises for about 6 minutes, it is a safe and convenient way of provoking a mild asthma attack. This has led to many children getting the proper treatment early.

Asthma attacks are very hard work. One of the dangers with an asthma attack is fatigue, which can cause you to be weakened in your struggle to breath. Obviously it is good to have strong breathing muscles, because the ones that are strong tend to tire less easily, and the only way to accomplish that is to do exercise. Asthma is far from being prevented by getting exercise, but people with asthma should get as much exercise as they can enjoyably manage. Good medications and intelligent use of techniques for getting around the problem of these types of attacks can achieve great results.