ARTICLES
Triggers and Causes of Asthma are Not the
Same Things
For asthma patients the day-to-day management
of the disease becomes an important part of everyday life.
Controlling asthma means paying careful attention to the
causes and triggers of the asthma.
The "trigger factors", or "triggers",
of asthma are used to describe the things that can cause
an attack in someone who already has asthma.
It is something that sets off an attack, but which does
not make a patient asthmatic in the first place.
A “cause” is something without which an effect
(such as asthma) will not happen.
That is, a cause is something without which the patient
would not be asthmatic. There may be more than one cause
for an asthma attack.
However, there is a lot of confusion surrounding these terms.
If a patient has an allergy to cats, dogs, pollen, mould
in wallpaper or house dust mites that cause asthma many describe
them as “triggering an attack”.
By demoting causes, by calling them triggers, makes people
think they are not so important, and that maybe they should
just keep using their inhalers instead of making efforts
to root out the causes of their asthma and remove these from
their environment.
For example, if you don't have asthma, or your asthma is
well controlled, then a cold will not give you any of the
symptoms of asthma.
So in this sense, it is fair to call the cold a "trigger
factor" for asthmatics.
But if an asthmatic has an attack whenever they go near
dogs, when dogs have been the cause of asthma (for instance;
the reason they have asthma is because of dogs) , going near
a dog can trigger an attack.
In other words, a dog can be a cause of asthma ‘and'
also a trigger of an attack.
Concentrating only on the triggering of the attacks misses
the really important point that contact with dogs was a cause
of the asthma in the first place.
Asthma sufferers will want to avoid both causes and triggers
of asthma, but the causes are more serious nature. If there
was no cause and the asthma didn't exist, the triggers would
do absolutely no harm.
Asthma – triggers vs causes ...
• When talking about diseases, it is important to
distinguish between causes and triggers.
• A trigger
for asthma is something which sets off an attack, but which
does not make you asthmatic in the first
place.
• A cause is something without which an effect
(such as asthma) would not be happening. That is, a cause
is something
without which you would not be asthmatic.
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