About Asthma: Symptoms, Diagnosis and Keeping It Under Control

Asthma is a disease of the lungs. It is one of the most common long-term diseases of children, but adults have it too.

Symptoms

Asthma causes wheezing, breathlessness, chest tightness and coughing, especially at night or early in the morning. Someone with asthma has it all the time, but has attacks only when something irritates the lungs.

An attack happens in the airways, the tubes that carry air into the lungs. They branch into ever smaller tubes, the way a tree's branches are thinner than its trunk. During an attack, the airway walls swell and the airways narrow, so less air moves in and out, and mucus the body makes clogs them further. The result is coughing, chest tightness, wheezing and trouble breathing.

You can keep asthma under control by learning the warning signs of an attack, avoiding the things that set one off, and following your doctor's advice.

Diagnosis

Asthma can be hard to recognise, especially in children under 5, and a doctor can help find out. At a checkup the doctor may ask:

• whether you cough a lot, especially at night;
• whether breathing problems get worse after exercise or at certain times of year;
• about chest tightness, wheezing, and colds that last more than 10 days;
• whether anyone in your family has or has had asthma, allergies or other breathing problems;
• about your home, and whether you have missed school or work or struggle with certain activities.

The doctor may also do a breathing test called spirometry, which measures how much air you can breathe out after a very deep breath, before and after using asthma medicine.

Managing it

Take your medicine exactly as your doctor says, and stay away from your triggers. Not everyone with asthma takes the same medicine: some are inhaled and some are pills.

• Reliever medicines treat symptoms when they happen. If you find yourself needing your reliever more and more, see your doctor about whether you need a different medicine.
• Controller medicines make attacks fewer and milder.

Asthma medicines can have side effects; most are mild and soon pass. Ask your doctor about the ones your medicines may have.

Help at home

A trained home visitor can help spot common asthma triggers in a home and talk through ways to reduce or remove them — which, along with good medical care, can improve health. CDC's Home Characteristics and Asthma Triggers Checklist for Home Visitors has a core assessment for any type of housing and climate, plus two add-on modules for dust mites and for mold and moisture when a visitor suspects them. Most of its suggested fixes are simple and cheap.

CDC's asthma basics are also available in Arabic, Chinese, French, German, Haitian Creole, Hindi, Korean, Mongolian, Burmese, Portuguese, Russian, Somali, Spanish, Tagalog, Urdu and Vietnamese.

Sources

• CDC, "About Asthma." https://www.cdc.gov/asthma/about/index.html
• Home Characteristics and Asthma Triggers Checklist for Home Visitors (PDF).
• The page's photo of smiling children in a park carries no credit and is plainly a stock photograph; it is left out.
• Rewritten in hubnx's own words.