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Diagnosed With Asthma, Now What?

If you've been recently diagnosed with asthma you might be intimidated by both what you don't know and the huge amount of information available about asthma.

The biggest question in anyone's mind at this point would be, where do I start?

Being diagnosed with asthma means you've already taken the correct first step, that is seeing a physician about your health problems. Hopefully, you physician and her/his staff did some teaching about asthma, it's causes, how to recognize an attack, and how to properly respond.

The goals of most asthmatics are to live an unrestricted life and deal with their asthma with the minimal amount of inconveniance.

The first steps you need to take will be with the help of your physician and his staff. Thier first job will involve medication needed to control symptoms, both short and long term. Secondly, they'll need to instruct you on how to predict and head off an attack.

Your asthma physician may also help you identify those things which trigger your asthmal and how to eliminate or avoid these triggers.

Even after all the teaching done by your physician there's still plenty of things you'll want to know. That's why this site in here. We can't replace your phyusican, but we can help augment the information and instruction you get from your physician. We try to break down the task into easy to handle bundles.

When you're talking medication most fall into two basic groups. Quick acting "Rescue" medication and long term "Control" medication are the two main catagories of medication when it comes to asthma. Most people are very familiar with Rescue medications and usually seen in the form of the inhaler.

Albuterol is the most common type of Rescue medication available at this time, but there are other.

Inhaled steroids have become the most common form of the Control medication. A low dose option which avoids many of the side effects of oral steroids.

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Understanding the difference between Rescue and Control medication is critical. Rescue medication is used to treat acute symptoms, such as sudden asthma attacks. Rescue medications treat wheezing and cough effectively by relaxing the small muscles surrounding the airways. The thing to remember is that Rescue medications do nothing to treat the underlying cause of the attack, inflammation.

To treat inflammation, the most commonly used medications are steroids, both inhaled and oral. The use of inhaled steroids can keep inflammation at bay without the side effect usually associated with oral steroids. The development of other long term asthma medications such as Singulair, Accolate, Xolair, and others take different routes than steroids and also avoid steroid's side effects.