Asthma Pregnancy

All kind of people have different asthma symptoms. This catchy is true for mothers-to-be, too. Your asthma may be mild, moderate, or severe. Mild asthma causes only an occasional attack, with few symptoms in between. If you have moderate asthma, you often get attacks more than twice a week, and you have harder time breathing.

Severe asthma causes an asthma attack almost every day and a chronic cough or difficulty breathing. The severity of your asthma determines how much medication, monitoring, and trigger avoidance you need to do.

Asthma is hard to predict. If you’ve had asthma during an earlier pregnancy, you might have a similar experience (in symptoms, medication, etc.) this time around. On the other hand, some women who’ve never had asthma develop it for the first time while pregnant. Meanwhile, about a third of women with asthma get worse during pregnancy.

Why? Researchers aren’t sure. They do know, however, that several common conditions during pregnancy can aggravate asthma, including upper respiratory infections, sinus infections, colds, and gastroesophageal reflux which causes heartburn.

Most asthma-related pregnancy problems starts when asthma cannot be controlled. If you’re not breathing well and your lungs are inflamed, you’re more likely to develop other problems. One of the most important is high blood pressure, which can lead to a condition called preeclampsia.

Preeclampsia is characterized by high blood pressure and swelling during pregnancy, which, if not recognized, can lead to a serious condition called eclampsia, which causes seizures. You can develop health complications even if you don’t notice your asthma symptoms are slowly getting worse.

Keep in mind, however, that for many women, asthma doesn’t change during pregnancy. You might even be surprised to find that your asthma symptoms actually improve. Again, researchers aren’t sure why this happens. Hormonal changes during pregnancy might help keep the body’s asthma-causing chemicals in check.

At this point of view asthma could be identical, improve, or worsen during your pregnancy. The difference means that it’s essential to stay controlled of your asthma. Together, you and your health care provider or doctor can fast notice any changes in your breathing and respond with medication or increased monitoring.