Identifying Symptoms as Asthma Related
- Thursday, September 17, 2009, 8:55
- Asthma
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- Elizabeth:
- I’m using my inhalers four times a day, both the Azmacort and my bronchodilator, and that’s a big drag.
- Rick:
- How long have you been dealing with asthma, Elizabeth?
- Elizabeth:
- Well, I’ve coughed and wheezed all my life as far back as I can remember. Although as you mentioned about getting used to your symptoms so does everyone else in my family, so I never really realized I had asthma until just a few years ago. And then I had an awful attack this year, worse than I’d ever had.
- Dr. Redding:
- I think one of the things that happens is that people get used to their symptoms. People who cough regularly begin to adapt to that so that they don’t really notice it. And similarly if you have exercise intolerance, it’s often easier to do a sedentary lifestyle than to press yourself or force yourself to do things that are otherwise normal activities because of your asthma. And it’s always helpful to ask a spouse or to ask a parent or a brother or sister, how they deal with it. Do they do normal things? And if you find that they don’t do normal things, maybe it’s time to wake up a little bit and realize that you can do normal things with asthma because of the treatments that are available. When we talk about peak-flow meters, one of the reasons we use them is to try and help people know what their symptoms mean. So for example, if somebody has a cough because they’ve got sinusitis or because they have a cold, that really doesn’t reflect their asthma. However, if they have a cough due to asthma, you can check to see if that asthma is worse by using the peak-flow meter.
Not everybody in the audience may know what a peak-flow meter is–it’s usually a small plastic apparatus, relatively cheap, and it’s used frequently in home settings so that you don’t have to do formal pulmonary function testing in an office. The peak-flow meter is helpful because it measures how fast air comes out of your lungs. If you have narrow airways, and a good analogy here perhaps is a straw, it’s hard to breathe out quickly through a straw. So if you happen to have narrowed airways because of asthma, you can’t get the flow out. What we measure with the peak-flow meter is that maximal flow you can get out and if your airways are narrowed, that flow is low.
I think that one of the things that is important to come back to, is that although we’re learning a great deal about asthma, our goals of therapy are really twofold: one is to be sure you have no symptoms during each day. In other words, symptom-free days are the goals of therapy. But in addition to that, we’re hoping that your lungs not only stay open but they also heal.
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