Asthma

Causes & Risk Factors

The well-known Cecil Textbook of Medicine states that asthma is a “clinical syndrome of unknown etiology,” meaning that allopathic medicine does not know what causes asthma. Approximately 60% of asthmatics have asthmatic parents, meaning that asthma has both genetic and environmental causes. There may be a predisposition, but there also needs to be some environmental insult to trigger the asthma.

Asthma is seen in association with allergies to foods or chemicals, pollens and molds, and cigarette smoke. It is also seen in people who have allergies to chemicals in their workplace environments, particularly to molds or to formaldehyde used in new carpets and glues.

Asthma may also develop after severe respiratory infection – those people whose colds always go to their chests. Infants with certain respiratory viruses (RSV, for example) develop wheezing and symptoms suggestive of asthma which may be persistent long after the respiratory infection has cleared. Foods, chemicals, pollens, molds, fungi, and certain viruses are well-known to cause wheezing, and may induce chronic asthma in susceptible patients.

Asthma is seen more frequently in households of smokers, and is found especially in children and grandchildren of smokers, if the smoking continued during pregnancy.

Article by Martha M Grout, MD, MD(H)
Arizona Center for Advanced Medicine

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