Breathe Easier Knowing What Triggers Your Asthma

Knowing your asthma “triggers” can help you protect yourself .  Avoiding these “triggers” that provoke the narrowing of the air passages can help you manage your asthma. 

• Cold air, if you move from warm indoor air to cold air outdoors.
• Tobacco smoke
• Emotional stress. Although there seems to be no really good research on this, people with asthma often say their asthma gets worse if they are upset.
• Infections of the lining of the breathing passages, such as colds and flu.
• Some drugs, especially medicines called beta blockers used for high blood pressure or heart disease.
• Irritants in asthma inhalers. Strange, but true. Some powder inhalers can cause a small amount of chest tightness. Pressurized aerosol inhalers need to have a lubricant and this can cause worsening of air passage narrowing, occasionally bad enough to be noticeable.
• Breathing tests. Just as the faster breathing in exercise can bring on attacks, the faster and deeper breathing you have to do for most breathing tests can bring on quite a noticeable worsening of airway narrowing in a few people.
• Sulphur dioxide used as a preservative in soft drinks and wine. This can cause chest tightening within seconds of drinking, or even breathing the air above such a drink.
• Indigestion, with stomach acid coming up into your gullet. This is called gastro-oesophageal reflux.
• Histamine or methacholine aerosols. In specialized tests doctors use an inhaled mist of these substances to measure how irritable your air passages are. In asthma they are more irritable than normal. During allergic or asthmatic reactions cells in the lungs release histamine . Methacholine mimics the effect of a substance (acetylcholine) released by nerves in the lung during asthma. Both substances cause an asthma attack in anyone who breathes enough of them, but people who have asthma will get an attack from a much smaller amount. In the test, the amount of asthma produced is small and very bearable, and it wears off quickly. The result gives us a measurement which can be very useful.
• Exercise.  Different kinds of exercise can cause more wheeziness or chest tightness than others. Running outdoors will generally be worse than swimming. In fact, swimming is one of the best forms of exercise for people with asthma because it usually causes the least amount of chest tightness. Running indoors on a treadmill, or cycling on an indoor exercise bike will come somewhere between outdoor running and swimming.
• Chlorine Fumes. Swimming in chlorinated pools may cause restriction in the airways.