As I developed DailyBreath, I reviewed daily articles regarding allergy and asthma, a result of Google search findings. In July 2017, I came across a story about a tragedy that was the result of an asthma attack. A young girl, 15, on vacation with her family, suffered a severe attack after a fun day at an amusement park, an annual summer trip, and then an evening visit to the hotel pool. Circumstances like this for most of the population are not dangerous, but for an asthmatic, exposure triggers can be anywhere and everywhere.
Doctors can't pinpoint what triggered 15-year-old's asthma attack; Burke High junior remains in ICU
It is always sad when an asthma attack has such a tragic result for the patient, in this case, a teenage girl full of vitality, but even more so when the circumstances may be preventable. Such situations only reinforce why it is so critical to empower patients with technology that can track the conditions under which a flare-up occurs.
We can do better than this! Let’s stop trying to pinpoint causes after the fact and do a better job of preparing asthma patients for the exposures they ‘may’ encounter. We need to embrace the asthma education necessary to prepare a patient to live daily with this chronic condition, without accepting asthma attacks as a norm. Patients need to feel empowered as they manage and control against the worst outcomes of their condition. The key to prevention is understanding your exposure triggers based on real experiences, so that the patient and provider can be partners in avoiding these scary and costly episodes in the future.
Patients need to be sensitized to recognize when they are experiencing the earliest onset symptoms, understand the exposures, and draw on a vast knowledge base of exposure intelligence to prepare them to avoid the triggers that pose a greater risk for them. Often an acute asthma attack can be the result of an exposure hours or even days earlier. Often the patient may not even feel that their breathing has been hampered any. However, a successive trigger comes along and exacerbates the problem because it further restricts the patient’s airway and makes breathing even more difficult.
Asthma sufferers feel they are at the mercy of the weather and their environment, but as with anything, if you measure the impacts, you can manage and control the risks. Our system must do a better job of helping patients avoid negative outcomes for patients living with a chronic condition like asthma.