asthma

[glenis]

when i was growing up in the 50's i didn't know a single person who had asthma ,no one in my school ,no friends or relatives ,how come now, it seems every other child has an inhaler.what on earth has happened?

[archbishop]

We were tougher in the 50's,bunch of woosies now.No,seriously it could have something to do with modern foods.Too many additives etc and too clean which doesn't allow resistance to build up in bodies.Everybody seems to have an allergy nowadays.

[nedflanders]

I am in my 30's (very early 30's) and when i was at school there was only a handful of people who i knew had asthma. But i agree that loads of peeps have inhalers now including more adults. My youngest daughter (3 yr old) has asthma and has had an inhaler for well over a year now so she has virtually had it since she was born. I have a really bad hayfever allergy but i don't know if there is a hereditary link to her asthma.

[Ember]

When I was in my 20's I had the most severe Hay Fever and would literally stand in the middle of the street sneezing for 15 minutes eyes streaming and swollen unable to go on. Unexplicably in my 30's it went away but it did leave me with very mild asthma, nothing serious and it only strikes occasionally. My worst attack was when in Germany on holiday I honestly thought I was waving the world bye bye, but there has been nothing like that since. I have heard of others who have "grown" out of it , so live in hope. Mind you I agree with Archbishop I am fairly certain it is additive and modern surroundings related.

[darth vader]

Obviously they don't know the answer yet but various avenues are being explored. as archb says hygiene is one theory, also food additives. Another is the increase in traffic pollution (brought about by the increase in traffic!). One day we will know, perhaps they know already but are too afraid to blow the whistle? (like cigarette smoking in the 50's and 60's)

[tartanwiz]

The number of cars on the road has about tripled, pouring fumes into the air. And in the last two decades the rate has increased at a quicker rate. Surely that must have something to do with it.

[jills]

I fit was simply due to cars....then the entire western world (or at least cities etc) would have a fairly similar no. of cases (%age wise), but this is not true. Last year I moved to a small village near the east coast of Scotland which, as my GP informed me, is the asthma capital of this entire region. This can't be because of car pollution (cos Edinburgh is ca 15 miles away, why wouldn't asthma be worse there??) and can't believe people here are more hygenic than people in the surrounding towns etc. Also, I grew up in Campbeltown...way down on the tip of the Mull of Kintyre....miles from anywhere, yet I have mild asthma. I also have soem allergies...and allergies have increased hugely in the last 20 years, probably linked in some way to the asthma. I've heard/read all the theories, and I worked in contract research for a long while myself, yet never came across a really plausible single explanation. It must be a combination of several factors. Latest thinking is that it may be related to the boom in bottle feeding/general decrease in breast feeding...ie parents today are bottle feeding their kids, and were bottle fed themselves...leading to an overall reduction in immuntiy etc. This was just one study tho, and by no means conclusive, much like most other studies into the matter.

[craig_edward]

this could be explained in several ways - there could be more asthma around nowadays, doctors could be better at picking it up, parents are more willing to take their children to the doctors, asthma management is better these days than back in the 50's. Various scientific theories have been put forward as to why there is more asthma around, one popular theory is that a lack of early exposure to pathogens (children no longer play in the dirt! greater use of antibiotics etc) means that kid's immune system is more prone to developing allergic responses to common environmental antigens rather than recognising them as 'harmless', therefore they are more likely to develop atopic conditions such as hayfever, asthma and eczema.

[Cetti]

I think there was probably a lot of asthma around in the 30's 40's and 50's, because as darth says almost everyone smoked but it came under the heading of Bronchitis or 'Chest infections'. My father and all my uncles smoked very heavily ( I can still hear them wheezing), but their chest problems were always diagnosed the same - Bronchitis.

In fact when I was told by my GP that my 3 year old son had asthma I didn't believe him, but until he was 13 years old he had inhalers, antibiotics, steroid treatment and was often very ill -but he did grow out of it thankfully - so there is hope for this quite frightening condition.

[maxi29]

I was born in the 50s and I can assure you that ashthma wasn't unknown then, as I suffered badly and, judging by the number of people who attended the special clinics I went to, there was a lot of it about. As Darth and Cetti point out, there was a lot of smoking then - I still remember the horror of going upstairs on buses (as kids were forced to) and breathing in so much smoke that I was nearly passing out. I would walk the couple of miles home rather than breathe in the fumes. As far as I'm concerned, I use my inhaler less now than I ever did, although when I was very young, we were treated with pills rather than inhalers - perhaps that's the reason you didn't see so many when you were a child.

[Scooter]

Well there has been a huge increase in traffic although they do tell us that the average car is environmentally cleaner that it was thirty or forty years ago. What I believe is a the root of the problem is the massive rise in the percentage of "DIESEL" engines. There has been a huge rise in freight delivery and courier type vehicles, vitually all of which are DIESEL. In addition DIESEL engined family cars are becoming increasingly popular where such cars were once extremely rare. I work in an environment surrounded by DIESEL engines and I believe I suffer for it.

[Amethy5t]

My own opinion - I'm 35 and have had asthma since I was 2 and was the only one in Junior school with asthma - is that the chemicals used on food, in the home, in cars and fuels, etc, are possibly to blame, but also I think Ashtma wasn't actually widely regarded before the 1970s and was under-diagnosed. It seems to have become very trendy to diagnose asthma with a friend of mine going to her GP with a sprained ankle and coming home complete with salbutamol inhaler!

[David H]

There are other more insidious additives that may well have side effects like fluoride in the water, and certain e numbers, sugar substitutes etc., that mean firms save millions of pounds frequently have very nasty effects on the users that, because they're not illegal to put in, the firms couldn't care less about although most are fully aware of the dangers. Putting crap in our food deliberately has been condoned by governments worldwide as it keeps big business and farmers happy and them in power as a result. Don't assume governments are there to help us, they couldn't care less and will happily let citizens die if it suits their own purposes. Just google on chemical contrails for one example. They give you a lot more than asthma, and that's the US government.