Justines Asthma pages

There is so many signals, so many clues, but still no understanding of asthma. Asthma dominates the waking hours of millions of British adults and children. Asthma can feel like constantly drowning over and over again and also feeling that when having an attack that it is this going to be the one that finishes you off. These are my feelings and the feelings of others. Severe attacks are a fight for life. It goes on over and over again every day. This is my life as a severe asthmatic. A constant battle to live, every day. There is hardly any funding for asthma. Heart disease and cancer upstage the long -term misery of those who labour just to breath. There is millions of children and adults with the disease and we feel as though we are neglected and have been let down. I often feel frustrated. Not understood. Alone and helpless and yet still no real explanations. Still no cure.

One reason asthma is difficult to tackle is because it is very badly understood. Asthma is not a new disease either the Greeks named it that as it means 'difficult breathing'. We still can not agree on what asthma really is and it's strange that every one has it differently. We also can not be sure of what really causes it or why the rates of it are going up. Maybe we have brought it all on ourselves. The UK has the highest number of asthma sufferers in Europe. Asthma is a great big jumbled up mess. Lot's of theories over the years have been rejected, and lots more I am sure will also go in the trash can. Nothing with asthma seems to be simple in any way.

When you ask people about asthma some get the picture of it as an entire family who live next to a motorway or a family with chain smoking parents. Well polution and smoke do cause asthma. They set it off,  but scientists are still struggling to determine whether cigarettes, traffic and other air pollution cause asthma or just make it worse. In the 1990's  diesal particals where found to cause damage to the heart and lungs causing car makers to change compression ratios in the engines to male diesal particals smaller. Whether this too has helped in the fight against asthma is still debatable, and we still do not know whether these particals act as an irritant or they actually cause changes to the cells that line the airways. A pregnant women who smokes does though increase her babies health by 50%  to get breathing difficulties. Children who's parents smoke also have a one and a half more times risk of becoming asthmatics. People who are exposed to secondhand cigarette smoke are more likely to get asthma, but smoking has been around for a long time now and you can not really blame the rise of asthma to cigarettes either.

The fact is that single-cause theories do not seem to ring any bells. At one time allergens alone were thought to be the key. Every one went on a cleaning spree to stamp out dustmites. It did help some, but the wheezing continued. For the last few decades the theory now seems to be that we clean and use to much cleaning products. It's all confsing to me. People seen to have sealed their homes and children rarely play outside. This is for fear of infections and colds. We take vacinations for everything. If germs break through we take antibiotics. Bacteria and human children no longer co-excist as they used to. This wall of cleanliness between us and the world may have had an infortunate consequence. Perhaps infections in early childhood used to prevent allergies and asthma. Well maybe. Is the window of opportunity maybe in the first years of life? Asthma experts however do not encourage us to bacteria exposure.

 Some people say it's our diet that cause asthma. Modern hygenic foods covered in pestisides and perservitives could be to blame. Is it possible that our sterile diets  could be why the immune system is not switching over to defend against infections. May be. Now adays we eat a more varied diet. We have more fruits and vegetables than we used to have. It's all clean. But I do not think food hygiene is the answer either. If you take perservatives out of food, we will have more food poisoning. Asthma is all very frustrating.

A best know name in the UK today, says that while lung disease, which includes chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and pneunomia, as well as asthma, is the second commonest cause of death in the UK, it gets only 2% (yes) only 2%, of the resources. Everthing is thrown towards Heart disease, diabeties and cancer. One third of children in the UK are suffering from asthma and this is absolutely unacceptable. It has got to be higher on the agenda. Two thirds of the 1,400 deaths a year are preventable. Often patient are caught out. They get themselves into cicumstances were they do not have the treatment or their asthma just spirals out of control. The fact we are losing children to this disease is totally unacceptable. It is underplaying the significance of the disease because it does not hurt.

And so scientists plough on with their search, making a discovery here, a break through there, and yet they are unable to find the cause. Could asthma be something that is caused in the womb? A certain scientist thinks milder forms of asthma could be allergy linked, but severe asthma could be another story. In fact it is almost as if they are two diseases. Mild asthma and life threatening asthma. In the past few years scientists have found evidence that the airways of chronic asthmatics are either permenately altered or possibly developed differently in the womb. A first gene discovered in asthma is thought to possibly control the way the muscle developes in the airways. Scientists now think that the enviroment factors maybe taking their toll at a much earlier stage than anybody used to imagine. They could be influencing the expression of genes in the developement of the foetus. It has already been shown that cigarette smoke can effect the same gene in the lung tissue of mice.Maybe cigarette smoke causes genetic changes in a baby's lungs in the womb which makes it at risk to asthma.

What seems to be the strategy for this epedemic of asthma. What can we do. Well I have to say, not alot. Thats the bottom line. If we want to get any further with asthma, we have to get people to understand and take this disease seriously (especially the goverment). In the US there is a policy that enough money is spent on health burdens, There is no such policy in the UK. Why is this the case? Someone needs to advertise this fact and tell the goverment. Why does no one seem to care? Prehaps no one knows that only 2% of health money only goes to asthma. This is ridiculous. It's the second most cause of deaths now in the UK. What is going on? I think people do not realise the severity of asthma (especially severe) so no one really knows or seems to care. Maybe this is why so many severe asthmatics are depressed. They blame the disease. I blame the complete lack of support from everyone around me.