What is the difference between exercise-induced asthma and asthma triggered by exercise?
There’s a huge difference between exercise-induced asthma and asthma that is triggered by exercise. Exercise-induced asthma is when within 10 minutes after completing your activity, you have a decrease in lung function and experience trouble breathing. What the vast majority of the population has is not exercise-induced asthma, but asthma that is poorly controlled and therefore is triggered by an activity. Exercise is a trigger for 90 percent of people with this form of asthma, and they will probably not get through the activity without having symptoms or signs of respiratory problems. So, the child who has to come off the soccer field after playing 10 minutes because he or she is wheezing doesn’t have exercise-induced asthma. That’s asthma that was triggered by activity. What causes exercise-induced asthma? What experts theorize that, when you’re exercising, you’re basically cooling and drying the airways, which leads to restricted air flow. Some 45 percent of athletes in the 1996 Sum
