Asthma is an inflammation disease of the airway, not the lung. It affects about 8-10% of the US population. About 75-85% of patients with asthma also have allergy or have positive allergy skin test to environmental allergens. About 3-10% is associated with aspirin / NSAID sensitivity and a similar percentage of asthmatics are due to occupational or industrial induced airway disease. Asthma most often begins in infant starting with an upper respiratory infection that causes wheezing. In children, if wheezing is mild and infrequent, it does not lead to asthma when your child reaches school age. Allergic asthma children who have mild symptoms can enjoy a transient or even permanent remission growing up. However, a more severe asthma with continued allergen exposure often leads to persistent asthma to adulthood. Allergic asthma usually develops during teenage years. Occupational asthma can persist even after staying away from the exposure. Besides from mild childhood asthma that might go away in certain cases as stated above, once you get a diagnosis of asthma, it tends to be a chronic condition and requires long term treatment including taking of asthma medications and environmental control. Untreated asthma might lead to recurrent bronchitis, or even bronchopneumonia.
In most cases, early signs of asthma present as chronic cough, being chronically fatigue, getting weaned easily or being blamed for laziness or out of shape. Unstable airways due to inflammation would lead to overproduction of stress hormones, which might lead to anxiety, panic attacks, hypertension and diabetes. Those symptoms are due to lost of lung volume and airway irritability. Late phase of asthma or durring an attack would see wheezes and acute shortness of breath. Appropriate treatment of asthma is key to prevent progressive lost of lung volume and to prevent serious infections like pneumonia. Also, there is indication that chronic barrier damages in asthmatics together with chronic bacteria colonization in the lowerairways might lead to new developement of autoimmune diseases. The most common autoimmune condition we observe is autoimmune thyroiditis or Hashimoto’s thyroiditis.
If you or your family have this condition, please come visit Texas Allergy for a discussion to see how we would help manage your symptoms to prevent it from frequent exacerbation and to make you tolerate normal activities including regular exercise. Besides offering quality allergy test and desensitization, our clinic also offers several targeted therapies with monoclonal antibodies against various allergy related mechanisms to control your symptoms with minimal systemic side effects. Below are services and procedures we offer for asthma at Texas Allergy.
- Lung function test
- FeNO (Fractional Exhaled Nitrite Oxide) Measurement
- Allergy testing
- Allergy shot, allergy drops and allergy tablets
- Aspirin desensitization if indicated
- Biologics for severe cases or hard to control asthma
- Asthma education
- Pulmonologist referrals for thermoplasty in certain cases of severe asthma if indicated
