Asthma Triggers vs Causes

If you have asthma, do you know the difference between its triggers and causes? You should -- 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 difficulty in breathing. Asthma cannot be cured, but for most patients it can be controlled so that they have only minimal and infrequent symptoms and they can live an active life.

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

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

"Trigger factors", or "triggers", of asthma are used to describe the things which can cause an attack in someone who already has asthma..

But you hear these words used for the dog to which you are allergic, or the cat, or the pollen that cause your asthma, or the mold on the wallpaper which causes your asthma, and even about house dust mites. Instead of calling these causes, which is what they are, people call them "triggers". They say that their cat is triggering their asthma.

This is a bit like 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 important, and that maybe they should just 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 occur. Thus, a cause is something without which you would not be asthmatic. There may be more than one cause for an asthma attack.

We normally think of a trigger as something small that causes something big to happen suddenly. A trigger is one type of cause. But the implication is that the important 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 important.

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

In this sense, it is fair to call the cold a "trigger factor". In addition, 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 dogs, then dogs in the past have been the cause, and a dog now can trigger an attack. In other words, a dog can be a cause of asthma and also the trigger of an attack.

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

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

By: Barbara Jones