Exercise Induced Asthma

Doctors used to puzzle over why children got exercise induced asthma and why adults did not. Eventually research discovered the reason - adults don't get exercise induced asthma simply because they don't take nearly so much exercise! It’s now believed that people who get exercise induced asthma only when they take exercise, just have an asthma which is too mild to show up most of the time, needing the extra provocation of exercise from faster breathing to bring it out, often in the form of chest tightness. If you take different kinds of exercise so that you use the same amount of oxygen in each one, some will cause more wheeziness, or chest tightness than others, thus leading to a potential asthma attack. Running outdoors will in general be worse than swimming. In fact swimming is one of the best forms of exercise for people with asthma, because it usually causes the least amount of chest tightness. Running indoors on a treadmill, or cycling on an indoor exercise bike will come somewhere between outdoor running and swimming.

Other exercise induced asthma factors influence the amount of worsening of your breathing, which you get from a particular form of exercise. Generally for example, if the air you breathe is cold and dry, the exercise induced asthma will be worse, with chest tightness in prominence. If it is warm and moist, the asthma will be less bad. This explains why swimming generally causes less asthma than outdoor running. The timing of the exercise is important. It takes about six minutes of exercising to bring on exercise induced asthma, and exercising for quite a bit less than this may not do it. For a few hours after you have had exercise induced asthma, repeating the same amount of exercise will no longer produce the same amount of asthma symptoms, or may produce none at all. So you may be able to 'run through' your exercise induced asthma, either by warming up with short bursts of exercise, or by continuous exercise which does not bring on chest tightness or a severe attack.

Exercise induced asthms in not normally associated with sports which consist of short bursts of activity, with periods of rest in between; indeed they can be particularly suitable for people with the condition. Examples include relay races, and team sports in which you are not running all the time, therefore unlikely to trigger exercise induced asthma. A surprising amount of athletes - especially skiers and runners - get exercise induced asthma. This may be partly because an amount of asthma which does not matter to most people, can mean the difference between winning and losing to an athlete, e.g a slight touch of chest tightness. So it may simply be that athletes notice the condition when other people overlook it. The other reason may be that the same underlying disease process goes unnoticed in non-athletes, because they simply never exercise to the degree athletes do.

Exercise induced asthma is an excellent example of a problem which you can begin to solve once you understand it better. Many Olympic gold medal winners have been asthmatic and have suffered from exercise induced asthma. With the right help and self-discipline, the problem can often be overcome. "Having asthma should not stop you leading a full and active life. With knowledge of my condition, the correct treatment and a desire to succeed, I became the Olympic champion!" Adrian Moorhouse, MBE