What is Asthma?
Asthma is a chronic inflammatory disease of the airways in your lungs that causes coughing, chest tightness, and difficulty breathing. It ultimately reduces the amount of physical activity you can engage in. It is characterized by inflammation in the airways (the tube-like pathways that carry air in and out of your lungs) and narrowing of the airways. Inflammation both swells the airways and, by producing mucus, makes them more susceptible to narrowing [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7].
What does Asthma do?
Asthma symptoms include wheezing, shortness of breath, coughing, and chest tightness. These are due to swelling of the lining of the airways and tightening of the muscles around them. An asthma attack consists of severe coughing and chest tightness. These may be accompanied by tightening the muscles around the airways, narrowing your breathing tubes even more.
Asthma is a big public health problem that affects millions of people. It is the most common chronic condition in American children. One of every 12 of them has asthma. Worldwide approximately 334 million people are near this disease [3, 4, 5, 8, 9].
What are the causes of Asthma?
The exact causes of asthma are not fully understood, but it is believed to be a combination of genetic and environmental factors.
Asthma features a genetic predisposition. For example, if an asthma patient is in the family, the chances of having the same problem brighten drastically [10, 11].
Aside from genetic causes, environmental factors can also cause asthma. Exposure to dust mites, mold, pets, pollens from grasses, trees, and weeds, and cockroach and mouse waste can cause allergic asthma and asthma due to exposure to substances that produce allergic reactions [6]. Non-allergic asthma can be induced by many non-allergen causes, including cold air, certain medicines, household chemicals, infections such as colds and the flu (influenza), outdoor air pollution, and tobacco smoke [6].
Occupational asthma is brought on by inhaling substances or dust in the workplace, and exercise-induced asthma during exercise – especially during physical activities in dry air [6].
Other risk factors include being overweight or obese, suffering from other allergic conditions such as eczema and hay fever, and exposure to environmental factors such as smoke and chemicals [10].
It's important to note that triggers can vary from person to person and can change over time [6].
Is Asthma Contagious?
Asthma is a well-known condition that causes inflammation of the airways, resulting in typical symptoms of coughing, wheezing and difficulty in breathing. Asthma is not contagious in any way, shape or form. Through no journey whatsoever, asthma doesn’t spread from one person to the next through kissing or otherwise [12].
Since asthma can run in families, it is also quite possible that people who have asthma ‘inherit’ genes that make them more likely to develop the disease. Indeed, the children of parents with asthma have an increased risk of asthma [12]. It is not the asthma itself that we inherit but a susceptibility towards its development.
Although asthma isn’t contagious, some infectious diseases such as pneumonia and croup disproportionately impact people with asthma, so they can spread through the population – but asthma itself doesn’t [12].
This is also true since symptoms associated with asthma can resemble those for contagious conditions, such as bronchitis or pneumonia, but that asthma itself is not contagious [12].