Asthma Triggers or Asthma Causes

If you have asthma, managing it is an vital part of your time. Controlling your asthma means staying away from stuff that trouble your airways and taking medicines as intended for by your doctor.

When talking about asthma diseases, it is significant to differentiate between asthma triggers or asthma causes.

A trigger is something which sets off an attack, but which does not make you asthmatic in the first place.

The "trigger factors", or "triggers", of asthma are used to explain the effects which can bring about an attack in someone who already has asthma.

But you hear these terms used for the dog to which you may be sensitive to, or the cat, or the mould on the wallpaper which causes your asthma, or the pollen that cause your asthma, and even something like house dust mites. As an alternative of calling these things causes, which is what they are, people call them "triggers". They say that your cat is triggering your asthma.

This is a bit like calling an on-coming car the trigger for an accident.

Demoting causes, by calling them triggers, makes people believe they are not so critical, and that possibly they be supposed to just keep using their inhalers instead of making efforts to root out the cause of their asthma and get rid of these from their environment.

A cause is something without which an effect (such as asthma) will not occur. That is, a cause is something without which you would not be asthmatic. There may be more than one cause for an asthma attack.

We usually think of a trigger aspect as something trivial, which causes something big to come about all of a sudden. A trigger is a type of cause. But the implication is that the principal causes have to be present previously if the trigger is to work, and that the trigger is not so significant. It is the cause which is important.

For instance, if you don't have asthmatic lungs, or your asthma is very well controlled by medication, a cold won't give you any symptoms of asthma.

So in this logic, it is fair to call the cold a "trigger factor". In addition, if you did not catch colds, this would not stop you having asthma, so in that sense it cannot be called the true cause of the disease.

But if you have asthma at any time you go near dogs, then dogs in the past have been the cause, and a dog now can trigger an attack. In other terms, a dog can be a cause of asthma and also a trigger of an attack.

Concentrating only on the triggering of the attacks misses the truly significant detail that contact with dogs was a cause of the asthma in the first place.

Obviously, an asthma victim will want to stay away from both causes and triggers of asthma, but the causes are more critical. Devoid of the causes, the triggers would do certainly no harm.

Asthma and Vocal Chord Dysfunction