Understanding Asthma is a Free comprehensive guide covering asthma's various forms, its symptoms, its management, and its treatments. An essential guide for anyone wanting to understand this growing health concern. Free! Learn more.

INVALUABLE ASTHMA INFORMATION

Are these an issue in your life?

Before we can take a closer look at these factors, however, we need to understand what we mean by the term "asthma." Most often characterized by a difficulty with breathing, asthma is a chronic inflammatory disease that causes a particularly sensitive reaction of a person's airways (bronchial tubes) to irritants. In most Western countries, it's a highly-ranked chronic health condition in adults, and is the leading chronic illness of children.

While asthma cannot be cured, for most patients it can be controlled so that they experience only minimal and infrequent symptoms.  Sufferers can still live active lives. However, managing the respiratory condition is important and requires a concerted effort to avoid those environmental factors that bother your airways, while properly using those medicines prescribed by your doctor.

Various environment factors, both inside and outside your home can serve as triggers of your asthma symptoms. Because of this, asthma sufferers often make the mistake of believing that it is better to live in a rural area rather than the inner city.

However, research has shown that even in the least polluted parts of the United Kingdom, such as the Scottish Highlands, the proportion of people with asthma is about the same as elsewhere.

There is no single best place for an asthma sufferer to live. Each person is unique, because each person's asthma reacts differently to environmental factors. The key, of course, is to live where you'll come into contact with your fewest number of triggers.  This is why it's doubly important to make sure you identify your asthma triggers early.

Some triggers, such as viral infections or cigarette smoke, can occur in any environment.  It doesn't matter where you choose to live.  Other triggers, such as air quality or pollen count can have a direct correlation to your surrounding environment. For example, if your triggers are linked to mold spores or dust mite droppings, you would be wise to avoid a house with obvious signs of dampness, or areas with nearby sources of surface water such as ponds or rivers or canals.

Some people worry that living close to an industrial or agricultural site such as a quarry, power station or chicken farm could trigger asthma attacks. However, at this time, published research on the effects of local industry emissions on surrounding communities is unfortunately limited, making it difficult to draw an informed conclusion one way or the other.

More important, most of us spend a large part of our lives inside our homes, so the effects of the indoor environment on our health are much more dramatic than the effects of outdoor air pollutants.

In the United Kingdom, you can check your local air pollution levels by contacting the Air Pollution Information Service, run by the Department of Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (DeFRA), or Teletext page 156. Pollens can blow for many miles but for general details, contact the Pollen Research Unit. During the summer months, you can also look out for regional pollen counts in local media, or on Teletext or television or radio weather forecasts.

In the United States, you can check the Air Quality Index, Ozone Levels, Particle Pollution, and UV Levels on a national basis at http://airnow.gov/. You'll also find links to local forecasts and conditions.

At A Glance

• Asthma is a chronic inflammatory disease that makes airways (bronchial tubes) particularly sensitive to irritants and is characterized by difficulty in breathing.
• There is no best place to live for everyone with asthma.
• Living somewhere where a person comes into contact with fewer of their triggers is the best idea, and this is why it is doubly important to identify your triggers for asthma.
• Some triggers can occur in any part of the country, such as viral infections or cigarette smoke, while others may vary locally, such as air quality or pollen.