Chronic Asthma & Bronchitis

While there are patients who just have hay fever and occasional asthma attacks as discrete events and are healthy between pollen or other allergen exposures there is larger group of patients who develop more chronic symptoms. Coughing, shortness of breath and wheezing may occur everyday or most days. Often several medications on a regular schedule are required everyday.  With continued antigenic exposure a chronic cell-mediated inflammation takes over. The chronic state is more difficult to characterize and understand. Persistent and recurrent symptoms that require daily medication are suggestive of delayed pattern food allergy. We encourage everyone with chronic or frequently recurrent asthma to try diet revision.

The variable delay of absorption of food antigens and the biphasic asthma response to discrete antigen challenge makes for a confusing variability in the timing of symptom-sequences following food ingestion. Further confusion arises when antigen challenge comes from food eaten everyday and acute responses overly chronic inflammatory activity in a complex and variable system of symptom production.

Bronchitis

Bronchitis is an inflammation of the bronchi, the large airways inside the lungs with increased mucus production and cough. Bronchitis can be caused by infections, food allergy, or by exposure to airborne allergens and irritants such as dust, fumes, or cigarette smoke. If caused by a virus, the bronchitis will likely be only temporary. If the exposure to irritants is persistent, then permanent damage to the bronchi, bronchitis may occur. Delayed pattern food allergy can cause chronic bronchitis with cough that is quite mysterious - no-one can guess the cause or identify the cause with tests. Only a trial of diet revision reveals the food cause. Cow's milk allergy is the most common cause of chronic bronchitis ( does not show up on skin tests).

Treatment Strategy

The three basic treatment  choices are:

1. Remove the Cause of Asthma
2. Treat the symptoms
3. Alter the host to be more tolerate of the causes

Remove the original cause

Consider asthma to be an allergic disease and look at the air and food supplies for the triggers of asthma. Here is a simple problem-solving approach. If asthmatic; then

1. Stop all smoking and association with smokers
2. Stop all use of volatile chemicals
3. If attacks of asthma are intermittent and related to airborne exposures then avoid the exposure or wear air-purifying filters when exposed and/or use preventive medications
4. If asthma attacks are seasonal and related to plant cycles, then get allergy tests and consider using preventive medication. If pollen allergy is the main and only cause of asthma, consider immunotherapy.
5. If asthma is chronic and tends to occur in all seasons and is not related to airborne exposure, then consider delayed pattern food allergy as the cause and do diet revision using the  Alpha Nutrition Program.

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