What is Childhood Asthma Or Infant Asthma?

Asthma is a very serious and common disease, one that affects millions of people worldwide. Of the estimated 20 million Americans suffering from asthma, there are approximately 9 million cases of childhood asthma. As you can see, child asthma is very common and can actually be more serious than adult asthma.

An Explanation of Child Asthma

When a child breathes, air travels between their mouth and their lungs. When a child takes a breath they take the air that is around them and they make it go down into your lungs. (Actually, they don't h ave to think about this process, their body takes care of that for them.) Between their mouth and their lungs are airways or tubes which is the road that the air travels on to get to where it is going. When your child exhales or breathes out the used air takes the same road to go from their lungs and out their mouth. When this air is in their lungs, their body takes the oxygen it needs from the air and tells their body to get rid of the rest by breathing out.

They don't have to tell their body to keep breathing, it just knows that it has to and they couldn't stop it for very long even if they wanted to. They can try holding their breath, (and sometimes children will) but their body will be fighting to make them breathe again and eventually they will have to give in and take a breath. If they hold their breath too long, their body won't get the oxygen that it needs and they can pass out as a result (not a healthy thing to do) and then their body will start breathing again on its own.

For a child with asthma, the roads or tubes that the air uses to get back and forth from their lungs are constantly swollen and irritated. Normally this is not a big problem, but the fact that the tubes are already irritated makes them very susceptible to things your child might be allergic to or that your child's body just finds irritating. When these tubes do get irritated they get smaller.

It would be like taking a drink through a straw. With a normal sized straw, your child can take a drink without a problem. If they try taking a drink with a very, very small straw, they have to try much harder to get that drink and they will probably get very frustrated because they can't get enough of a drink to satisfy their thirst.

That's what happens to a child with child asthma. When their airways or roads get irritated by some outside factor like maybe a certain food that they are allergic to, these airways start to get smaller and smaller. When that happens, it is like taking a drink through a very small straw. The difference is that with a drink you can just stop trying to take a drink until you find a bigger straw. With breathing you can't do that. Your body will keep trying to breathe even if your tubes become very small. This can become very terrifying for a child with child asthma.

Unfortunately, when something happens to a child with asthma to irritate their airways, it sets off a chain reaction of events that make the airways even smaller, making it harder and harder to breathe. The muscles around the airways tighten up making the airways smaller, inflammation or swelling increases causing the airways to become even smaller, cells in the airways make more mucus which leaves even less room for the air to get through, all of which makes it harder and harder to breathe. When this is happening it is usually called an asthma attack or an asthma episode.

Some asthma attacks are worse than others. If the airways become so small that the lungs can't get enough oxygen from the little bit of air that is getting through, then it becomes a medical emergency. Your child's body has to have oxygen in order to survive. If there body is not getting enough oxygen, their vital organs can cease to function and death can result.

One of the areas that Bob Hughes writes about are diseases and afflictions that are very common yet have no definite cure in the medical world such as asthma, insomnia and others.

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by By Bob Hughes

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