Asthma Symptoms

Asthma: Introduction

Asthma is a chronic (long term) inflammatory disease that affects your air passages. This respiratory disorder causes breath shortness, wheezing, coughs and tightness in chest.

There is also inflammation of the lining of your airways. This leads to a tightening of muscles around your air passages making it narrow. Allergy to substances including hay fever is the main cause of asthma.

What are the Asthma Symptoms?

Symptoms and signs of asthma vary among individuals. Further, you may experience symptoms once a month or a week, albeit you can possibly suffer from one every day.

As an asthma patient you will experience frequent chest tightness. Your airways become filled with mucus, get inflamed and constrict leading to a feeling of tightness in chest. This can occur alone or accompanied by other asthma signs and symptoms.

Indications for slightly advanced asthma are similar to that of mild asthma. You may have short term periodic symptoms with breath shortness. With intermittent asthma attacks you can have bouts of wheezing or coughs.

Here are some common symptoms for asthma:

• Wheezing
• Breath shortness
• Coughing
• Tightness in chest

Wheezing (a whistling sound that occurs when breathing out) or night coughing is among the most common among severe asthma symptoms.

These symptoms can last from a couple of minutes to days on end and can cause serious health complications with a restricted airflow.

Symptoms can occur in the daytime or at night. Your sleep may get disturbed due to nocturnal coughing. Severity of asthma attacks can change over time due to environmental and other factors.

You may feel out of breath or feel like you cannot exhale air out of your lungs during an asthma attack making breathing difficult. Shortness of breath can also be accompanied by wheezing cough or persistent cough.

Shortness of breath is one of the major symptoms of asthma that helps your doctor identify the type of asthma you suffer from. In some cases breath shortness can be potentially life threatening and requires immediate medical support and diagnosis.

Night coughing often signals the presence of chronic asthma and is often accompanied by other common symptoms such as wheezing, shortness of breath and tightness in chest.