How do you know it’s allergy induced asthma?
I got a great question from a reader yesterday. Claire wrote in to ask, “Jess, how do you know it’s allergy induced asthma as opposed to just regular asthma?” After typing up my reply to her and sending it off, I realized that you might be wondering this too, so here’s my answer.
Personally, my answer was: because my doctor told me so ;-). Which isn’t all that helpful, I know, so I called him up and asked him how this sort of thing is determined and what the difference is between allergy induced asthma and non-allergic asthma.
He said that in case like mine where I had no history of allergies, the diagnosis is a little trickier–usually if the patient has allergies to the environment or to foods, allergic asthma is the first thing considered, but when there are no other allergies present, some doctors may incorrectly believe that it’s definitely not allergy induced asthma.
So, that’s the first thing to consider–do you tend to have other types of allergies? Do you get itchy eyes during the spring? Are you allergic to eating wheat? That sort of thing can be an indication that you might be more likely to have allergy induced asthma than non-allergic asthma.
If you don’t have any other allergies, like me, the next thing the doctor will ask you about is *when* you have asthma symptoms. For me, it was definitely in the spring. And, for my doctor, that was an indication that I had allergy induced asthma.
If your asthma symptoms aren’t seasonal, and you have no other allergies, it’s more likely that you have non-allergic asthma. Since I have allergy induced asthma, I really can’t speak to any other type, but from friends who have this type, I know that some of what works to lessen my symptoms helps lessen theirs as well.
When you answer yes to both questions–you do indeed have allergies, and your asthma symptoms are definitely seasonal–your doctor will probably diagnose you with allergy induced asthma. In other cases, it’s likely that he’ll want to run a few tests to be sure, and you may be put on anti-allergy medications to see if that reduces your asthma symptoms. Ultimately, that was how my doctor proved to me that I had allergy induced asthma–by putting me on antihistimines that reduced my symptoms.
Once you know that it’s allergy induced asthma, this is important for lots of reasons. First, it’s important because it’ll help your doctor determine your treatment! But, the other reason it’s important is that while there’s still widespread disagreement about why some people develop allergies and other people don’t, something that most doctors agree on is that allergies are really unpredictable–some years, you’ll be more allergic than others, to a greater degree than can be explained merely by the differences in pollen counts from year to year. Also, a lot of people stop being allergic after several years (or by moving to a new area) while other people develop allergies later in life. It seems like, more than other health conditions, allergies are somewhat of a “moving target” in terms of the unpredictable way they develop in individuals and throughout one person’s life. That’s why it’s so important to keep trying new things for your allergy induced asthma–because even if three years ago, you tried eating more onions and it made no difference, that doesn’t mean that eating onions today wouldn’t help. So, be flexible, and allow yourself to try new approaches to healing your allergy induced asthma for best results.
So, that’s how you’d know if it’s allergy induced asthma, and also a little bit about what difference that makes in your treatment (that you need to be more flexible in finding what works than you might if you had non-allergic asthma). How did you find out you had allergy induced asthma?
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The article is useful for me because I have allergic asthma too. I’ll be coming back to your blog.