from Hacker News

Doctors Might Have Been Focusing on the Wrong Asthma Triggers

by aliasEli on 7/11/21, 5:51 PM with 49 comments

• by mensetmanusman on 7/11/21, 6:47 PM

  I have had asthma my entire life, and it definitely flares up with airborne irritants.

  There has been awesome citizen science work going on helping people understand the direct link between anything that emits smoke and asthma attacks: https://www.healthaffairs.org/doi/10.1377/hlthaff.2017.1315

  They even found that parents waiting to pick up kids at schools with their ICE engines running increased PM2.5 inside the entire building by orders of magnitude.

  This data helped the kids teach their parents to stop their engines when waiting outside the school in order to help their asthmatic classmates.

  The transition to EV is going to have a positive impact on people’s health and make city life better.

• by jonnycomputer on 7/11/21, 8:41 PM

  I come from a part of the US with fairly severe air pollution (2cd or 3rd worst in country). And asthma is a huge problem there, much so more than elsewhere. It is fairly obvious that the air pollution is the cause of the problem. Perhaps we should differentiate between the causes of the disease, and the hazards that trigger asthma attacks.

• by aaron695 on 7/11/21, 11:44 PM

  This doesn't really suggest a wrong focus.

  Pollution was down. Stress was down. People staying at home means cleaner houses. Sharp temperature changes were down... probably, you'd miss the commute big ups and downs but also miss the office climate control. Peoples lives were mostly more controlled, far less variance.

  And viruses were down.

  > The ensuing months, to everyone’s surprise, turned into “this beautiful year,” Lawson told me. Scarlett hasn’t had a single asthma attack. Not a single visit to the ER. Nothing. She’s breathing so much better,

  This doesn't fit with viruses, wouldn't lack of viruses only account for severe ER attacks that happen during a few scattered periods, not the whole year. It will be a mix, but 80:20, it should be one big thing.

• by philjohn on 7/11/21, 6:47 PM

  I certainly noticed this - over the last year I've gone from using reliever inhalers several times a week to not needing them for months.

  I did also start a new medication, Montelukast, around the time of the first lockdown, so it could conceivably be due to that in my case - but not having a chest infection at all for the last 18 months whereas I used to get one a year or so has been lovely.

• by belltaco on 7/11/21, 7:02 PM

  I wonder how much impact the reduced pollution due to reduced traffic during the lockdowns and increased remote work later had on the study subjects, even if they were indoors.

• by elric on 7/11/21, 7:53 PM

  Irceline publishes PM2.5 stats for Belgium. Here's [1] a pretty little chart with the annual mean PM2.5 concentration. If you switch between 2020 and 2019, the difference seems pretty small. Same for PM10 and Black Carbon. If the pandemic had a big impact on air quality, that effect seems to have skipped Belgium at least. It's a shame there's no similar dashboard for viruses and allergens.

  [1] https://www.irceline.be/en/air-quality/measurements/particul...

• by snowwrestler on 7/12/21, 5:10 AM

  Surprised not to see exercise listed. It’s a common trigger for asthma attacks, especially in cold dry air, and I bet there were pretty big changes in exercise patterns for a lot people during the pandemic.

• by MengerSponge on 7/11/21, 7:04 PM

  https://publicintegrity.org/environment/the-invisible-hazard...

  I imagine that keeping schoolchildren home from those schools would substantially help their respiratory health.

• by edejong on 7/11/21, 9:49 PM

  There has been the hypothesis that it’s actually bad ventilation in schools and offices causing the asthma related problems. One thing to check before choosing a school for the kids.

• by enlyth on 7/12/21, 12:20 AM

  This year, I had my first summer without needing to take antihistamines in over a decade, I actually wonder what has caused this