Manage asthma before it manages you
Whether you are newly diagnosed or have been living with asthma for years, you can benefit from keeping up to date on how to manage triggers and drug treatments that control the disease. Because people vary in their sensitivity to environmental triggers and response to medications, every woman with asthma should work with her doctor or asthma specialist to develop a custom treatment plan.
If you know how to limit exposure to your triggers and take the appropriate type and dose of medication to control inflammation, you can minimize symptoms, prevent attacks and enhance your quality of life. "More than 90 per cent of asthmatics can make asthma a minor nuisance if they know how to control it," says Boulet.
Unfortunately, asthma becomes much more than a nuisance for many. A study from the University of Toronto found that almost 60 per cent of Canadians with asthma have poor control of it. They experience regular symptoms and periodic attacks that interfere with their work, sleep and physical activity. Many are hospitalized. Each year in Canada there are nearly 150,000 emergency room visits due to asthma attacks, most of which
are preventable.
An ounce of prevention
Medications used to treat asthma are divided into two main categories: controllers for regular maintenance and relievers for short-term relief of symptoms. Regular daily use of a controller (or preventer) medication, an inhaled corticosteroid, treats inflammation in the airways and prevents symptoms such as coughing, wheezing, breathlessness and attacks.
Combination therapies, such as Advair and Symbicort, are maintenance drugs that contain a corticosteroid in addition to a long-acting beta-agonist bronchodilator that relieves airways tightness for up to 12 hours; these drugs may be prescribed for patients whose asthma is not adequately controlled by a low dose of corticosteroid alone.
Asthma relievers, called short-acting bronchodilators, are used to quickly decrease asthma symptoms by relaxing the muscles that surround the airways. These fast-acting rescue medications do not reduce inflammation in the airways.
Exercise helps manage asthma symptoms
Asthma experts, including Boulet, recommend exercise, with a proper warm-up, for anyone whose asthma is well controlled by medication. "Regular exercise and weight control are important measures to help manage asthma," he says. "If you're sedentary, your asthma becomes more difficult to control. If you're fit, you hyperventilate less."
Jasmine was caught by surprise when she suddenly developed asthma as an adult. She suffered two harrowing attacks because she wasn't aware of the warning signs and didn't know how to deal with the symptoms. It took Jasmine less than two weeks to learn how to manage and treat her asthma. She now takes the combination drug Symbicort and hasn't had any attacks.
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