What are the Causes of Asthma?
During an asthma attack, the patient's airways become irritated,
narrowing and constricting, causing difficulty in breathing by
restricting airflow.
Why do some people have asthma while others don't? Why is asthma
more common in the Western world?
The causes of asthma are complicated.
It is include our genes, the things that we are exposed that may
develop into allergies and contributing factors in the
environment such as pollution that can determine whether these
genes and allergies will cause asthma at some time during our
lives.
Although asthma is not contagious and you cannot catch it
through contact with another person, you can inherit the asthma
tendency from your parents.
If a parent is a smoker then a child is twice as likely to
develop asthma than children of non-smoking parents.
Children whose mothers smoked during pregnancy are often born
with smaller airways, which can greatly increase the chances of
the disease developing.
The "westernised" lifestyle and the environment in developed
countries has a lot to do with the chances of whether a person
will develop asthma or not.
These factors include pollution, allergies to house dust mites,
cats, dogs, and moulds.
Ironically, it seems that childhood infections and exposure to
substances from bacteria in a dirty environment, assuming such
an environment doesn't kill you, seems to build up a protection
against allergies and resistance to asthma that is why richer
populations have more allergic disease.
Allergies are the cause of almost all asthma in young people,
meaning that the patient has both inherited genes that have a
tendency towards asthma and have been exposed to allergy -
producing things in their environment. Both the allergies and
the genes are the causes for developing asthma, because if
either of them were not present then no asthma would develop.
At a Glance ... Asthma - Causes
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