Reducing Irritants In Your Child’s Environment
- Monday, July 20, 2009, 3:53
- Asthma
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- Gina:
- What can a parent do about their child’s environment in order to help them if they’ve got asthma?
- Dr. Redding:
- Environmental preventive measures should be considered in two ways. The first is to reduce irritants, and tobacco smoke, woodburning stoves, incense burning, those are all good examples of airway irritants. We’ve also talked about asthma being allergic in nature. Not everybody with asthma has allergies, but a good proportion of children, particularly those over the age of six, are likely to have allergies as one precipitating factor for worsening asthma or persistence of asthma. In that circumstance, skin testing is probably ideal as a diagnostic way to figure out what in your environment is making asthma worse. If you don’t know what makes asthma worse in your child or if you don’t know what makes your asthma worse, skin testing may be very valuable to identify certain environmental exposures that you can do something about.
- Gina:
- I’m wondering about pets in the house. Do you just automatically assume if the kid’s wheezing around them that they’re a problem, or will skin testing say, “Nah, don’t worry, you don’t need to get rid of the cats, but you do have to get rid of the dog.”
- Dr. Redding:
- Those are very good questions. I think that parents and asthmatics can tell you very well the circumstances under which their asthma flares, so that every time someone pets a cat, their eyes water, they become short of breath, they cough. If it happens on a recurrent basis, I’m not sure you need skin testing. So, I think there’s a lot of common sense to asthma diagnosis in terms of environmental irritants or allergens that precipitate asthma attacks. At the same time, if you have multiple exposures, such as a dog and a cat and a bird, and you’d like to know which of those might be making your asthma worse, and you can’t discern among those contacts, then skin testing makes a lot of sense so that you can selectively alter your environment without getting rid of all the pets in your house.
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