Asthma – Steps In Making The Diagnosis
By editor | August 15, 2007
Medical history: The first and most important step in accurately diagnosing asthma is a careful, complete medical history. Your child’s doctor will start by asking a lot of questions about your family history of allergy and asthma. The tendency to have allergies and asthma often runs in families: Among at least half of all children with asthma, one or both parents (more likely the mother) have allergies or asthma. Children who have already been diagnosed with allergy symptoms, such as eczema (skin rash) or rhinitis (runny nose), or with a food allergy, are more likely to have asthma as well.
Symptom patterns: The doctor or nurse practitioner will ask you and your child for a lot of details about the child’s shortness of breath, coughing, wheezing, and chest tightness. These questions are an important first step in understanding the child’s symptom pattern:
- Does your child cough and wheeze yearmround or just during certain times of the year?
- Does she have at least some symptoms, such as slight wheezing, all the time?
- Do the symptoms go away and then flare up again?
- How often do the symptoms occur? Every day or night? Just a few times a week? Once a week or less?
- When do the symptoms happen? Does your child cough more at night and when she first wakes up in the morning?
- Triggers: Next, the doctor will ask about things you may have noticed that make your child’s symptoms worse. The list of possible asthma triggers is long, but it’s very important to go through all of them to help pinpoint exactly what brings on your child’s symptoms or makes them worse. The asthma triggers your doctor will ask about include:
- Colds, respiratory infections, sore throats, ear infections, sinus infections.
- Allergens, such as mold, dust mites, furry or feathered animals, pollen.
- Running, active play, exercise.
- Tobacco smoke.
- Cold weather or big changes in the weather.
- Woodsmoke from a stove or fireplace .
- Foods that contain additives and preservatives .
- Certain medicines, such as aspirin.
if being around any of the typical asthma triggers makes your child’s symptoms worse, that is the clue that asthma is the problem. Knowing which triggers affect your child is an important part of asthma treatment. Discovering and treating your child’s allergies, for instance, will do a lot to help her asthma. You can also take simple steps at home to reduce or eliminate her exposure to triggers.
Severity: The next important step in understanding your child’s symptom: pattern is to gauge how severe symptoms are. Your doctor will want to know:
- Do the symptoms interfere with daily activities such as eating, walking, and playing quietly?
- Do the symptoms wake your child up in the night or keep her from
- napping?
- Do the symptoms keep your child home from school or daycare or keep your child from doing well in school?
- Have you called the doctor or brought your child to the doctor’s office for unscheduled visits because of asthma symptoms? .
- Has your child needed to go to the emergency room or been hospitalized because of asthma symptoms?
- What helps alleviate the wheezing, including any medicines?
Your doctor may have already prescribed a trial of an inhaled medicine to help open your child’s breathing tubes even before a diagnosis of asthma is made. If so, you’ll be asked if your child needs the medicine more often than before. All this information is important for helping the doctor understand the symptom pattern that points to asthma.
It can be very difficult for a parent to know or remember over a period of several weeks exactly what seems to make symptoms worse or how often or when they occur. You cannot always tell which triggers are around your child, because many allergens, such as pollen or dust mites, are invisible. To help you keep track of your child’s symptoms, many doctors and nurse practitioners suggest keeping written notes over several weeks.
Being able to tell the doctor exactly how many times your child woke up in the night with wheezing and coughing, for instance, will be a big help in deciding whether asthma is the problem and how severe the asthma is. You’re probably not around your child all the time, so ask other caregivers and your child herself (if she’s old enough to understand) about asthma symptoms. Bring your notes with you to the doctor’s office to help everyone get a better idea of your child’s symptom pattern.
Tagged under:allergies allergy symptoms Asthma asthma children asthma triggers chest tightness dust mites food allergy respiratory infections runny nose sinus infections skin rash sore throats
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