Exercise-related asthma is common in college athletes
NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Asthma provoked by physical exertion is a common and often unrecognised occurrence in collegiate athletes, a study shows.
Among 107 Ohio State varsity athletes from 22 different sports assessed for exercise-induced asthma, 42 (39 percent) tested positive. For 36 of these athletes (86 percent), this was their first diagnosis of asthma of any kind.
Neither the sex of the athlete nor the breathing demands of the sport affected the likelihood of uncovering exercise-induced asthma, according to the report in the journal Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise.
Exercise-induced asthma occurs when airflow to the lungs is reduced by narrowing and closing of the airways in response to exercise.
"Exercise-induced asthma is quite common and there are many athletes that are unaware that they have significant declines in lung function during exercise," Dr. Jonathan Parsons, associate director of the Asthma Center at Ohio State University Medical Center and lead author of the study, told Reuters Health.
"The symptoms of exercise-induced asthma are often perceived by coaches, parents, and even athletes themselves, as accepted manifestations of exercise; hence the diagnosis is often overlooked," Parsons explained.
"If there is any suspicion that exercise-induced asthma is present, formal lung function testing is critical to document the diagnosis," he added.
His team used a test that involves stressing the lungs of an athlete by making him or her hyperventilate and then measuring their lung function to determine if it decreases from the stress, mimicking the expected changes in exercise-induced asthma. Previous studies on college athletes did not use this technique, "which is the International Olympic Committee's test of choice in documenting exercise-induced asthma," Parsons noted.
"The symptoms of exercise-induced asthma," he warned, "are very non-specific, so attributing all exercise-induced breathing problems to exercise-induced asthma will result in many inaccurate diagnoses. That is why testing is so important."
