GERD is an acronym for gastroesophageal reflux disease, a medical condition related to the regurgitation of stomach acid. GERD is very common and is typically manifested as heartburn and indigestion, including a sour taste in...
Vocal cord dysfunction (VCD) syndrome, a notorious asthma mimic, was first described in 1983 by doctors from the National Jewish Hospital in Denver, Colorado. VCD is the result of abnormal paradoxical vocal cord movement. Humans...
Yes, several medical conditions can mimic asthma. Surprisingly, not all of them are lung diseases! The lung dis-eases that should be differentiated from asthma include the COPD group (such as emphysema and chronic obstructive bronchitis)...
COPD and asthma are lung ailments. Asthma and COPD can both give rise to similar symptoms, and are sometimes treated with the same medicines. Both conditions can lead to variable breathlessness, wheezy breathing, coughing, and...
Asthma is a specific lung disease that is different from emphysema and chronic obstructive bronchitis. COPD is often used as a kind of shorthand to describe emphysema, chronic obstructive bronchitis, or a combination of both....
COPD is an acronym for the term chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. Chronic obstructive pulmonary dis-ease is a descriptive term rather than a single disease, although it usually is used to refer to emphysema or to...
Yes, depending, of course, on what your exact symptoms are. Medical students and physicians in specialty training are taught the skill of differential diagnosis. When reviewing and analyzing a patient’s report of symptoms, the physician...
The presence of a persistent cough is always abnormal. There are many reasons why cough may develop. Each one of us has experienced a cough at some point in our lives, when ill with a...
No, not necessarily. The to-and-fro movement of air through the lungs and tracheobronchial tree should always be silent. A wheeze is an abnormal sound produced by turbulent flow of air through the lungs. There are...
Gemma’s comment: In my teens, I attended a boarding school in northern New York State. I found that in winter I could always develop a noisy wheeze if I opened a window and took big...
A wheeze is the sound generated when air travels though a breathing passage (airway) that has become narrowed. The narrowing can be due to mucus secretions trapped within the airway or to the airway muscles’...
Asthma is characterized by periods of exacerbations and remission of symptoms, as mentioned briefly in Contemporary View Of Asthma. During a remission of asthma, symptoms are well controlled and measurements of lung function normalize. An...
Medical textbooks correctly inform us that “classic” symptoms of asthma are three in number: wheezing, cough, and abnormal sensations of breathing, or dyspnea. If you are studying for a knowledge test, mark those three symptoms...
In the past, asthma was considered a disease principally of airway narrowing, termed bronchoconstriction. In the traditional view, bronchial passages encircled by specialized muscle fibers became narrowed (constricted), leading in turn to the development of...
The hygiene hypothesis is a theory that attempts to explain the increased prevalence of allergy and asthma in affluent, industrialized nations. It also strives to elucidate factors that are responsible for the development of asthma...
As mentioned in causes asthma, the development of asthma is thought to arise from complex and poorly understood interactions involving a person’s inborn genetic characteristics and elements of the environment in which he or she...
Allergy and asthma are two separate medical conditions, despite the fact that asthma often co-exists with a diagnosis of allergy, especially in children and in teenagers. The development of asthma reflects a particular genetic or...
Asthma is believed to result from a complex interplay between a person’s genes and various environmental fac-tors at a specific time in his or her life. It can thus be viewed as the result of...
Yes, our lungs continue to grow and develop after we are born. In particular, the specialized gas-exchanging lung units called alveoli, where oxygen is exchanged for carbon dioxide, develop postnatally. The majority of the lung...
The lungs are the major component of the respiratory system (Figures 1A and 1B). A good way to understand the workings of the lungs is to consider their structure, or anatomy (Figure 1A). The human...
Asthma affects people of all ages, as mentioned in How many Americans have asthma, and a diagnosis of asthma can be made in a child as young as 2 years of age. Asthma is the...
Asthma is very common, affecting approximately one of every ten Americans at some point in their life, according to 2001 data from the CDC’s National Health Interview Survey. It is not clear why asthma has...
Yes, asthma has increased steadily in the United States through the 1980s and 1990s, as in other Westernized countries. There are more persons diagnosed with asthma now than ever before in the United States. The...
Asthma is a very common lung disease. It has been described in all ethnic groups and in all ages, from child-hood into the golden years. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC’s) National...
Asthma is a very common, highly treatable lung condition. Millions of individuals worldwide, children and adults, carry a diagnosis of asthma. Asthma’s symptoms relate to breathing and to the respiratory system. Symptoms of asthma vary...