The Search For Asthma Relief

In the last 25 years, the number of occurences of asthma symptoms in the general public has more than doubled. It's gone from 3% to 7.5% - nearly 25 million people are affected in the United States alone.

There are a number of theories as to why this is but no definitive answers, leading people to question why it's on the rise, particularly in urban areas.

Some doctors feel that one of the reasons asthma has become more and more common is because there are less major diseases for our bodies to deal with. As a result, our immune systems are becoming under-used and they overreact to smaller triggers like allergens.

This is just one of the theories, however. There are more and more people living in urban areas, where there are far more allergens in the air that can trigger asthma - dust mites, secondhand smoke and mold, for example.

It is also believed that a contributing factor to asthma and childhood is the fact that children are not as active as they used to be - spending more time indoors where they are exposed to these allergens.

Asthma treatments have become more than just medicine - they have much more to do with lifestyle changes and managment of the problem. Instead of reacting to acute asthma attacks, treatments are looking more at management through environmental control, daily medication and other natural remedies for asthma.

These modern treatments include daily maintenance inhalers, better education about causes and triggers and once-a-day oral medicines.

In spite of all the research over the past 25 years, there have really been very few new drugs for treating it. The primary reason being that the existing asthma supplies, such as inhalers and asthma respirators, that are available work quite well. The most common problem with them is not that they aren't effective, but that people do not use them the way they are intended.

According to the CDC (Center for Disease Control) these modern approaches work well. A recent study by the National Institute of Environmental Health Services showed that children who were given education about managing asthma had 37.8 more symptom-free days than those were were just treated with no further education.