Asthma Triggers Versus Causes

If you have asthma,  do you know the difference between its causes and triggers?  You should — because your breathing may depend on it.

Asthma is a chronic inflammatory disease that makes airways (bronchial tubes) particularly sensitive to irritants,  and this is characterized by breathing difficulties. Asthma cannot be cured,  but for most patients it can be controlled fairly well so that they have only infrequent and minimal symptoms and can live an active life.

If you have asthma, managing it should be an essential part of your life.   Controlling your asthma means staying away from things that bother your airways and taking all your medicine as directed by your physician.

Read how this person cured his asthma the natural way

When discussing diseases,   it is important to distinguish between triggers and causes.   A trigger is generally something that sets off an attack,  but which did not make you asthmatic in the first place.

“Triggers” or “trigger factors”  of asthma are used to describe the things which can cause an attack in someone who already has asthma.  But you hear these  terms used for the cat to which you are allergic,  or the dog,  or the pollen from trees or other plants,  or the mold on the wallpaper which causes your asthma–and even about household dust mites.   Instead of calling these reasons,  which is what they are,   people call them “triggers”.   They say that their dog or cat is triggering their asthma.

This is a bit similar to calling an on-coming car the trigger of an accident.

Demoting causes,  by calling them triggers,  makes people think that the causes are not so crucial,  and that maybe they should simply keep using their inhalers instead of making efforts to root out the cause of their asthma and remove these from their environment.

A cause is something  without which  an effect (such as asthma)  will not happen.  Therefore,  a cause is something without which you would not be asthmatic.   However, there may be more than one reason for an asthma attack.

We usually think of a trigger as something small that causes something big to happen suddenly.  A trigger is one form of cause.  But the implication is that the vital causes have to be there already if the trigger is to work,  and that the trigger is not important.   It is the cause which is essential.

For instance,  if you don’t have asthmatic lungs,  or your asthma is under control,  a cold virus won’t give you any symptoms of asthma.

In this sense,  it is fair to say the cold acts as a “trigger factor”.  Nevertheless, if you stopped catching colds, this would not stop you having asthma,  so in that sense it cannot be called the true cause of the disease.

But if you have an attack whenever you go near cats, and you know that cats have been the cause in the past, then a cat now can trigger an attack.   In other words,  a cat  can be a cause of asthma and also the trigger of an attack.

Concentrating only on the triggers of the attacks misses the really crucial point that contact with cats was a cause of the asthma in the first place.

Obviously,   an asthma sufferer will want to avoid both the triggers and causes of asthma, but the causes are more serious.   Without the reasons,  the triggers could do absolutely no harm.

Tagged with: asthma attack • asthma triggers

Filed under: Asthma