How can Asthma be diagnosed

For Asthma to be diagnosed one needs to go to an Asthma specialist who will diagnose based on the medical history, physical exam and results from various tests. Doctor will also figure out what is the level of Asthma is it intermittent, mild, moderate or severe. Based on this analysis the treatment of the asthma patient will start.


Medical History
  In the medical history part doctor will ask you about your family history and allergies that you have. He may dig into the roots and check if there are any symptoms you have ever recognized of asthma. There are cases where symptoms might be worst at some time an normal at other times. In some cases asthma is worst at night. He might ask you as to what are the triggering factors that causes it. Along with this there are also certain other health conditions like running nose, sinus infections, reflux disease and sleeping disorders.

Physical Exam
   In the first physical exam that can be done is checking for wheezing or any other allergy symptoms from your breathing. It can also be identified from skin conditions where patients have severe itching sensation and dry skin. A spirometry test can be done to check how the lungs are functioning. This test shows how much air can you breathe in and out. After recording the results again the test needs to be taken after taking some medication to see if there are any improvements in the results. If the later results are better and from medical history it is very likely that you might be having asthma.

Other Tests
  There might be several other tests which needs to be done to make sure what exactly is the cause of asthma.
Some of them are

• Allergy test to find out the allergens that affect you.
• Test to measure how sensitive are your respiratory tracts by using spirometry.
• Test to check if you suffer from any other disease like acid reflux, sleep disorder etc.
• A chest X-ray or electrocardiogram.

These tests will help to find out the symptoms that is causing the asthma.

To diagnose asthma in children is very important and these symptoms may be shown in their early ages before 5 years which is very difficult to diagnose. A young child can have asthma if he has frequent cold, running nose or respiratory infections. If there are any such symptoms immediately get the child diagnosed and get the relevant tests done which will help to cure it at its very early stage.

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