Posted on 11/30/2006 9:46:43 PM PST by neverdem
When our first son developed asthma as a 3-year-old, my husband and I felt pretty much blindsided. We were only a little less shocked when the same thing happened to our second son, at the same age.
The disease turned out to be tenacious, and for years both boys needed inhalers or a nebulizer machine several times a day to prevent asthma attacks that could keep them up half the night, coughing and wheezing.
Both had eczema, too, and the kind of food allergies — to nuts, peanuts and shellfish — that can lead to fatal reactions.
What caused all this? My husband and I were mystified, because neither of us had asthma or life-threatening allergies, nor did our parents or siblings. I do have hay fever and allergies to cats and dogs, but I had always considered my symptoms just a nuisance — not a bad omen for the next generation. My husband isn’t allergic to anything.
But we seem to have been caught on a rising tide that no one fully understands. Our sons were born in 1984 and 1987, and we encountered an awful lot of children their ages who had the same illnesses, far more than we remembered from our own generation.
Statistics suggest that something strange was occurring in those years. From 1980 to 2003, the prevalence of asthma in children rose to 5.8 percent from 3.6 percent, an increase of about 60 percent, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Other estimates from the disease centers show an even bigger increase in the asthmas rates for younger children: a 160 percent jump in those younger than 5 from 1980 to 1994. But changes in data collection starting in 1997 make it hard to compare the figures before and after that year.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Most of the folks in the world are stilling having to deal with the real parasites (mostly due to contaminated water) so they have very few allergy issues even though they are surrounded by dust, pollen, and all kinds of allergens. Their eosinophils are just too busy to get worked up over the little stuff.
An oximeter clipped to the tip of your finger gives the quickest, most accurate picture of your oxygen transport system.
This is for information, not an advert!
http://www.fact-canada.com/Sportstat/sportstat-pulse-oximeter.html
Sounds plausible -- wouldn't be the first time people got rid of one problem, only for the "cure" to introduce more -- but different -- problems. (The mythological many-headed Hydra comes to mind!)
Not really.
A food processor will run multiple batches of different produces on his machinery each day. If you process something with peanuts, wash down, then process something without nuts, it is probably legally safer say "may contain peanuts" or "processed on machines that were used to process peanuts" than to leave the warning off.
Asthma and allergies are auto-immune deseases.
That means your own immune system is attacking its own tissue.
The cause of these problems seems to be that when the kids are growing up, they are not exposed to enough dirt, enough bacteria and enough viruses to properly train the immune system to attack foreign invaders only and not your body's own tissue.
So today you have an immune system that evolved in a time when kids where getting sick nearly every day from the dirt, bacteria and viruses they were running into on a daily basis.
We have an immune system that is finely tuned to fight infections 24 hours a day but it is not getting trained on what to fight early in life and it is not getting exposed to enough foreign invaders on a daily basis to keep it busy.
Accidents happen, the system gets out of proper control and now our active immune systems are causing allergies and asthma.
Let you kids go out and play in the dirt the way they were supposed to.
Or do some research on the few doctors who are experimenting with injecting people with different levels of different foreign bodies in order to reset the immune system. There has been some good results to date.
I got asthma in my 40s (really have it, not pretend) from living in a valley that had a lot of plywood and particle board mills. Formadehyde in the air, big time. In fact, I later learned that valley has the highest incidence of asthma and related respitory complaints in the US.
I moved away, still have the asthma.
If the "hard to breathe" condition is actually present during the doctor visit, then that would be a perfect time to use the inspirometer to get a reading of the amount of constriction. It is possible that a stethoscope could detect the additional noise that a constricted airway could generate. But the presumption would seem to be that the constricted airway would disappear when the "hard to breathe" condition disappears. Also, the inspirometer permits a quantification of the condition that would be hard to determine using a stethoscope.
I know three people other than myself who experience asthma symptoms when around cleaners, perfumes, and related petrochemicals. All of us can trace it to over-exposure to such chemicals. One worked in beauty salons for years, one worked in contruction and was heavily exposed to polyurethane finishes, one did a cleaning business.
We all have to go out of our way to use products that have no petrochemical based cleaners, perfumes, etc. Basically all perfumes (other than those made from plant based essential oils) are made from petroleum by-products; some from coal by-products.) It is common among asthma sufferers to react strongly to perfumes, but often natural fragrances do not bother them.
A lot of products claim "natural fragrance" but are mixed with the regular petroleum based ones too. One has to be careful.
I would think that this would be useful for determining whether a "difficult to breathe" condition was an effect rather than a cause. Sometimes excitement causes hyperventilation which would be labored breathing accompanied probably by a rise in blood oxygen.
The advantage of the inspirometer is that it can quantify the constricted airways which are the definition of asthma and it can do that when the attack is not severe and when the subject is at rest and not so troubled by the airway constriction. This permits early accomodation to a potentially deadly episode.
A detectable decrease in blood oxygen might not occur until well into an attack. I don't know anything about how the oximeter readings might tend to vary normally and how they might vary during an asthma episode.
This author has a regular byline and probably a paycheck too from the NY Times. A "NYT contributor" makes me think of guest OpEd writers like Tom Wolfe.
The disabling event is normally hypoxia leading potentially to unconsciousness.
The oximeter is great for apnea and usefull if flying in unpressurized aircraft.
There's something to be said for small doses of contaminants which might build up immunities. At least that's what I told myself when my house wasn't antiseptic and the kids were crawling all over, putting things in their mouths. ;o)
I'm sorry that I didn't catch this fundamental misunderstanding earlier. The basic problem in asthma, aka reactive airway disease(RAD) and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease(COPD) is the dysfunction in expiration, also known as exhalation, from bronchoconstriction. The impaired airway exchange because they can't empty their lungs means that they retain carbon dioxide while starving for oxygen. That respiratory acidosis causes carbon dioxide narcosis which causes the person to pass out.
Beware of what you read on the net. If you want medical information, check out MedlinePlus first. Get some mileage from your taxes. I haven't caught them passing bogus information. The device is called a spirometer. It is used for gauging forced expiratory volume in one second(FEV1) and six seconds(FEV6), the latter being a substitute for forced vital capacity(FVC).
I did perhaps too quick an internet search to remind myself of the name of the device. Other than getting the name of the spirometer wrong, is there some other "fundamental misunderstanding" that you are pointing out?
IIRC, inspirometer was mentioned a number of times. The problem is in expiration/exhalation from bronchoconstriction, mucous plugs, etc.
Are you referring to MTBE? If so, I suggest you do some research before you spout.
Good thing California legally mandated that MTBE be put in all the fuels and leak into the groundwater.
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