Asthma is a health condition that causes a person’s airways to close up, making it difficult to breathe. Around 25 million Americans suffer from asthma, but few fully understand the short and long-term effects of asthma.
Understanding how asthma impacts your health is one of the first steps towards managing it and living your life relatively uninhibited. Therefore it’s important to take the time to understand this condition and how you can live your life with asthma. Here’s what you need to understand about the short and long-term effects of asthma.
Understanding The Effects Of Asthma
Before taking a look at the short and long-term effects of asthma on your health, it’s important to understand how asthma works and in what ways it impacts your body. This will help provide clarity and understanding about its effects later on.
Asthma is a condition that causes an individual’s airways to become inflamed, irritated, narrow, and swollen. This can create an excess build-up of mucus which makes it difficult for an individual to breathe. Asthma can range from mild to severe, and depending on the severity, can even become life-threatening.
Symptoms of asthma often include difficulty breathing, pain in the chest, coughing, and wheezing. Thankfully, these symptoms can be managed through breathing aides such as inhalers. However, even when managed, it’s possible for asthma to have short and long-term effects on your health.
The Short-Term Effects Of Asthma
As previously mentioned, the short-term effects of asthma can include symptoms like:
- Wheezing
- Coughing
- Tightness in chest
- Shortness of breath
- Mucus build-up
These short-term effects can be brought on by a variety of triggers including:
- Allergies
- Exercise
- Cold weather
- Hot weather
If you’re experiencing asthma symptoms, whether you’ve been diagnosed with asthma or not, reach out to your healthcare professional about symptom management. The short-term effects of asthma can interrupt your day-to-day life and cause you to miss out on important memories with friends and family. Learning to manage asthma symptoms will help you live your life.
The Long-Term Effects Of Asthma
Severe asthma, or untreated asthma, can cause long-term effects to your health. These long-term effects are far more difficult to manage, and often irreversible. When asthma symptoms are left untreated or get out of hand, they can often result in long-term effects such as:
- Exercise intolerance
- Constant infections
- Narrowing of the bronchial tubes
- Higher risk of depression
- Missing days of work
- Higher risk of obesity
- Lasting coughing spells
Learning to manage your asthma is the key to avoiding long-lasting problems.
If you suffer from asthma, speak with your doctor or healthcare professional about how you can manage your symptoms to decrease the chances of suffering from long-lasting effects. If you feel hopeless, take heart in knowing that asthma is manageable, and with enough learning and patience, you can live a normal life, uninterrupted by the effects of asthma.
