Asthma Eczema 

Discover The Links Between Asthma and Eczema

In today’s world there are many diseases for which nobody can find a cure; some are life-threatening while others just compromise a person’s quality of life. 

With these types of diseases, the symptoms can be managed but scientists have yet to find any way of truly curing them.  Most of these diseases are unrelated to each other and have no real connections to any other diseases. 

But there are a few cases as is similar with the diseases known as eczema and asthma, where a link between them can be proven – where having one makes you much more likely to develop the other.

Eczema is a type of skin condition that’s characterized by inflammation of the epidermis, or outer layer of the skin that can often be painful. 

The symptoms can be very mild or very severe and including things like skin blistering, crusting, cracking, flaking, redness and itchiness, skin swelling and even oozing or bleeding in more severe cases. 

Fortunately for sufferers’ medications are available which will provide good control of the symptoms of eczema. They are called corticosteroids.  Medications such as these are extremely good at helping control eczema but it must be noted they are not a cure.

On the other hand, Asthma is an acute inflammation of the lungs whereby the airways become narrowed causing breathing to become difficult to as good as impossible at times. 

Approximately 7% of the US population suffers from asthma and 300 million people total worldwide suffer from it. 

Symptoms of asthma include things like shortness of breath even when at rest; night time coughing; a chronic cough that sounds like throat-clearing and tightness in the chest. 

Asthma attacks have varying severity levels; they range from mild to severe enough to actually cause death and while asthma can be controlled in most cases with medication, there is no cure.

These two diseases seem unrelated at first; after all, how can a skin disease cause someone to begin suffering from something like asthma? 

It is now known 50% of all young children who develop eczema will go on to developing asthma as well. 

Scientists have only recently discovered that when the skin becomes damaged due to eczema, that skin begins to secrete a substance that ends up circulating in the body’s bloodstream. 

This substance ends up circulating in the bloodstream and through the lungs, and then sets off asthma-like symptoms that develop into full-blown asthma which is why young children who develop eczema will go on to also have asthma.

This is an invaluable discovery to the medical world. 

They now believe that if they can begin aggressively treating eczema and if they can make sure that the body doesn’t begin making that substance then most of the children who have eczema will not go on to develop asthma as well. 

If they are successful in this, it will keep thousands of children from suffering needlessly from asthma eczema.