Asthma and the immune system

Asthma and The Immune System
“Asthma is a Greek word meaning “gasping” or “panting.” It is a chronic obstructive pulmonary (lung) disease that involves repeated attacks in which the airways in the lungs are suddenly blocked.( Asthma. By: Boehlke, Paul R., PhD, Huang, Shih-Wen, MD, Small, Caroline M,2019)”. For those who live with asthma life is not always the easiest for them. Physical activity can be hard has you do not always have the air flow needed to perform the activity you need. Depending on the air quality of where you live you could have to limit your activity or even avoid going outside so that you can avoid an “asthma attack”. “Asthma attacks cause the affected person to experience tightening of the chest, sudden breathlessness, wheezing, and coughing. Death by asphyxiation is rare but possible.”( Asthma. By: Boehlke, Paul R., PhD, Huang, Shih-Wen, MD, Small, Caroline M,2019)”. The authors explain that asthma can be experienced by different people depending on how bad they experience asthma from mild to severe persistent attacks where the attacks are minimal and there is little to no need for medication, to seeing a person spend multiple days in a hospital and is constantly having to use their medication. Asthma is split into two categories extrinsic triggers and intrinsic triggers, but we are going to be looking more at the extrinsic triggers that affect the immune system. I want to go over why this happens, and what causes it to occur.
Extrinsic asthma like I said in the last paragraph effects mainly the immune system and how it in turn effects the body. “Emerging studies have highlighted how the immune system shapes the scope and intensity of sensory responses by directly modulating the sensory nervous system. Additionally, factors produced by neurons have demonstrated novel functions in propagating atopic inflammation at barrier surfaces.”( Oetjen, L. K., & Kim, B. S.,2018). Again like mentioned before in the previous paragraph the extrinsic asthma effects the body from mild instances to more severe ones. With this being the case we can see from what Oetjen & Kim said that depending on how ones immune system responds to the asthma determines whether the kind of asthma will respond with in your body. Asthma has triggers where they will be the main cause for why someone may or may not have an attack from some of these triggers are “environmental irritants (e.g., smoke, air pollution/smog, chemicals, mold, paint fumes, and seasonal pollen),pet dander (e.g., from cats and dogs), household irritants (e.g., dust mites, dust, cockroaches, mold, and cleaning agents),food products and ingredients (e.g., dairy products, nuts, and sulfites), emotional stress, exercise, or cold air.”( Asthma: Risk Factors, Triggers, and Prevention, By: Hillary Mennella,Tamra J. Ashley, RN). Theses triggers disrupt the sensory nerves inside of our lunges and causes an overload of responses that lead to the coughing and weezing often associated with an asthma attack.
Asthma is wide spread but it has been hard to narrow down what initially causes it to happen in certain individuals. Even with the causes not being quite understood Hillary Mennella and Tamra J. Ashley have come to find a list of causes which are including but not limited to “genetic susceptibility/parental history of allergy or asthma, obesity, which not only increases risk of developing asthma, but also appears to associated with asthma that is more severe and more difficult to control, smaller airway at birth (e.g., due to premature birth, male gender, or in utero exposure to tobacco smoke), exposure to elevated traffic-related air pollution in the first year of life, exposure to indoor pollutants, including secondhand smoke, ozone, and molds” .”( Asthma: Risk Factors, Triggers, and Prevention, By: Hillary Mennella,Tamra J. Ashley). As we can see there is a lot of different causes for asthma and it can be brought on by many different things and honestly it is hard to even prevent it in development, as shown in the information above you can develop it by being introduced to one of the causes above and continued exposure can make things worse. As I have mentioned this all comes down to how our immune system functions and takes in these different factors. For some these factors can have little to no effect, but for some it could mean something much worse.
Growing up I didn’t know many people with asthma, none of my friends had it and I was only acquainted with a few people who had it so I never knew what it could do to a person. The most I had ever seen from an asthma attack was seeing a kid having to pull out their inhaler and use it, that’s it. That changed two years ago when I met my now wife, She was the first person I had gotten to know who suffered from this affliction. When we dated she mentioned to me that she had it but we didn’t do much to activate her asthma and feel its affects. I saw a little of her having to use her inhaler but the first time she had a hard attack was when we spend time in Zions national park. We had spent the day hiking around the park and when we got to a part that made us physically exert herself that’s when I found out how bad she had it. It was hard to see someone you care about have something happen to them where you can’t do anything to help, its quite scary. She was good about knowing her triggers and being able to handle them when they came on, but she pushed herself and it caused her to have a bad asthma attack. For a while after this she was very careful about what she did and how she handled herself when she thought she might have a bad attack, but that didn’t help when she was hospitalized a couple of months ago due to her asthma. My Wife’s asthma gets worse if she gets sick, and especially if that sickness is a cold where she is caused to cough more than normal. She ended up with a summer cold and had a horrible cough, we thought this would pass in just a couple of days but when it persisted for a couple of weeks it was starting to get scary. There would be nights where she couldn’t sleep because she would have hour long coughing fits, and these coughing fits weren’t little coughs they were deep and could tell how much they hurt. This died down until one day she pushed herself just a little too much where she had a two hour asthma attack, one where she was left to taking small uneven breaths. She had little to no strength and when she didn’t have enough lung capacity to speak I had to rush her to the hospital so that she could be treated by medical professionals. It was very hard watching the most important person to you struggle to do what we all just take for granted. I wanted to cover this topic because I wanted to learn more about what causes this condition for her and what I can do in the future to help make sure this never happens again.

Bibliography
-Mannella, H., & Ashley, T. J. (2018). Asthma: Risk Factors, Triggers, and Prevention.
Oetjen, L. K., & Kim, B. S. (n.d.). Interactions of the immune and sensory nervous systems in atopy. FEBS Journal, 285(17). Retrieved from http://eds.b.ebscohost.com.libprox1.slcc.edu:2048/eds/detail/detail?vid=5&sid=542fb1cb-5ec8-40cb-96e1-94443a330c09@pdc-v-sessmgr01&bdata=JnNpdGU9ZWRzLWxpdmU=#db=agr&AN=IND606127659&anchor=AN0132087428-5
-Oetjen, L. K., & Kim, B. S. (n.d.). Interactions of the immune and sensory nervous systems in atopy. FEBS Journal, 285(17). Retrieved from http://eds.b.ebscohost.com.libprox1.slcc.edu:2048/eds/detail/detail?vid=5&sid=542fb1cb-5ec8-40cb-96e1-94443a330c09@pdc-v-sessmgr01&bdata=JnNpdGU9ZWRzLWxpdmU=#db=agr&AN=IND606127659&anchor=AN0132087428-5
– Asthma. By: Boehlke, Paul R., PhD, Huang, Shih-Wen, MD, Small, Caroline M., Magill’s Medical Guide (Online Edition), 2019