Why Does Asthma Take Your Breath Away?

Useless muscles and inflammation conspire to wreak havoc with your lungs

Image by Freepik

Uncontrolled asthma is the reason a substantial proportion of the hospitalized children I take care of have landed in the hospital. And adults are no better at controlling their asthma, with fewer than half of the adults who have asthma meeting the criteria for well-controlled asthma.

I often ask my asthmatic patients and their parents what asthma is. Can they tell me? No. Like, almost never.

There are two ways asthma wreaks havoc with your lungs. These two components of asthma are essential to understand if you have asthma and want to keep it under control. Stay with me now, you can catch your breath at the end.

A breath of fresh air

Your lungs are responsible for breathing oxygen in and carbon dioxide out. Your body needs oxygen to turn food into energy in a process that creates carbon dioxide as a byproduct. (Interestingly, plants run this system in reverse, turning carbon dioxide combined with energy from the sun into food, releasing oxygen as a byproduct. Clever, eh?)

Your lungs draw air in through your mouth and nose, through the trachea, or “windpipe,” down through a tree of ever smaller but ever more numerous…