The Truth About Asthma

The truth about asthma is that the medical treatments for it are ineffective and dangerous, but the good news is that you can overcome it with a holistic treatment program.

Read about Medical Treatments and Holistic Treatments

Asthma is medically defined as a chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, characterized by a hypersensitivity of the airways. Common symptoms of asthma include difficulty breathing with wheezing and coughing, feeling of tightness in the chest, copious production of mucus, apprehension and increased heart rate.

Sometimes asthma is divided into extrinsic and intrinsic asthma. Extrinsic asthma is mainly due to allergens, be they airborne or from food. Resulting immune reactions release inflammatory compounds that cause spasms of the bronchial tubes. Allergy is a likely cause of asthma in about 90% of children and about 50% of adults. These figures vary from different sources depending on how they tested for allergy.

Intrinsic asthma is not due to allergies, and may come from microbial infestations, emotional factors, and mucus congestion from other causes.

With asthma we usually see three sets of biological symptoms:

1. The airways become obstructed due to bronchial spasms,
2. The bronchial walls become inflamed and swell with further narrowing of the airways,
3. Additional airway obstruction is caused by copious amounts of thick, tenacious mucus.

During an attack, these symptoms are triggered and result in an acute shortness of breath. Because in this situation it becomes easier to inhale than to exhale the lungs may become hyper-inflated.

Asthma, especially in older individuals (over 55) is also associated with a doubled risk of other diseases such as heart disease, stroke, diabetes, cancer, arthritis and osteoporosis.

Asthma Statistics

There is a twenty-fold difference between the highest and lowest rates in the world. The lowest prevalence rates are found in Indonesia, Albania, Romania and Georgia while the highest are in the United Kingdom, New Zealand, Australia and Ireland.

The exact order may change from year to year between different countries and for different age groups. For Australia the Asthma Foundation stated in January of 2006:

• Australia has the second highest prevalence of asthma in the world. The reasons for this are unclear.
• The incidence of asthma is steadily increasing, with the number of people with asthma doubling between 1982 and 1992.
• Approximately 1 in 4 children, 1 in 7 adolescents, and 1 in 10 adults have asthma (that has been diagnosed by a doctor.
• In Australia, asthma affects around 12% of the population (over two million people), leading to nearly 40,000 hospitalizations and 314 deaths.
• Indigenous Australians have more asthma than others.

Here some additional statistics. In New Zealand 15.5% of adults (one in six), and 21% of children aged 0-14 years have asthma. Among 14 year olds the rate is as high as 30%.

In the USA the overall rate of asthma is only 6.4%. Out of 56 countries worldwide surveyed, the UK had the highest prevalence of severe wheezing amongst children aged 13-14 years. The number of new cases of asthma each year is now three to four times higher in adults and six times higher in children than it was 25 years ago.

The prevalence of asthma can be as high as 30% among certain populations, and internationally, cases have more than tripled in the last ten years.