Asthma Symptoms - Find Out All About the Common and Not So Common Ones

No matter what type of asthma you want to talk about, the asthma symptoms will pretty much be the same. The one exception is cough variant asthma which only has one symptom. So no matter what type of asthma you have, your major symptoms will be the same. What does change for everybody is how bad those symptoms will be during each asthma attack.

Asthma symptoms don't follow any specific rules and can be very unpredictable. For many people, they have to deal with their asthma symptoms almost every day. For reasons not totally understood, others might have their symptoms only show up every once in a great while.

No matter how often they show up, these are the four common asthma symptoms that most people have to deal with:

• Coughing - While your airways stay irritated, you will be doing a lot of coughing. Your cough is almost always accompanied by gunk or mucus.



• Wheezing - kind of a whistling sound that is more noticeable when you breathe out or exhale. Your airways have become much smaller so there is less room for air to go back and forth to your lungs.



• Tightness in the Chest - Your airways have muscles surrounding them and during an asthma attack these muscles put the squeeze on your airways. This tightness can even turn into pain.



• Shortness of Breath - Taking a normal breath is just not possible when your airways get so irritated.

Here are some lesser known asthma symptoms to keep an eye out for:

• Your Neck Muscles Getting Extremely Tight - this might be bad enough that you have trouble talking.



• Extreme Anxiety and Maybe Even a Feeling of Panic - not being able to breathe is usually more than enough to get us very anxious.



• Your Lips or Fingernails Turn Blue - this is letting you know that not enough oxygen is getting into your system. You are entering into a dangerous situation.

All of the above asthma symptoms start to show up once your airways have become sufficiently irritated. This is the way that your airways get even with you for being exposed to one of your asthma triggers. These symptoms sometimes show up very quickly. Other times they might slowly show up over a period of hours or even days. Either way, it means that you are having an asthma attack.

Some people are able to recognize early warning signs that they are about to have an asthma attack. Not everybody recognizes these early warning signs. But if you know to start looking for them, you might be able to determine a pattern for your attacks also. I have listed some of the more common ones below:

• You start to have unusual trouble sleeping.



• Your normal exercise routine becomes more difficult.



• Concentrating becomes a problem.



• Your breathing becomes more rapid.



• You notice that you are more anxious than normal.



• Your overall energy level had dropped.



• You notice that you are sighing for no reason.

Getting to know what is normal for you will help you to recognize when things begin to change. This might help you to be better prepared for when your asthma symptoms do show up.