Question

Meet Sarah Sarah is a 22-year-old veterinary assistant who has come to the emergency room with significant trouble breathing, chest tightness, and is quite anxious. She recently started her first job at a veterinarian clinic where she has been exposed to animals she is not usually around. She takes a daily allergy pill to help with allergies initiated by hay fever and her dog and cat at home but has no other prior associated medical history.

1. What are your initial observations of the patient in this case?
2. What do you think the diagnosis may be? What are the associated cellular and physiological mechanisms that may be occurring?
3. What are the demographic statistics of patients with this condition?
4. What may be the treatment options for this patient?
5. What are the major risk factors that may contribute to the onset of this condition?
6. How may a patient need to make changes to their lifestyle/habits to prevent complications from this condition?

Answer 1

1. When seeing the condition of Sarah, she has difficulty in breathing and excessive sweating, she is anxious. She has high heart rate and low respiratory rate and while breathing, breath sounds are diminished with faint wheezing throughout the lungs. So it seems like, she has asthma.

2. Here in this case, Sarah has adult-onset asthma. Adult-onset asthma occurs in adults of age above 20. In most cases, these kind of asthma associated with allergies. There different kinds of diagnosis are available. First by seeing the above mentioned symptoms, one find it as asthma by consulting with a doctor. Next by using lung function tests like spirometry, we can diagnose this problem. Spirometry is used to measure the amount of air exhaled after taking a deep breath and the amount time required to empty the lungs. If you can't able to diagnose asthma in spirometry test, then you can do methacholine challenge test. Other than this, by using chest and lung X-rays we can able to diagnose this problem.

3. According to details given by World Health Organization (WHO), around 235 million individuals having asthma worldwide. And over 80% of asthma-related deaths occur in developing countries.

4. In most of the cases, asthma is treated by using inhalers. Inhalers helps to breathe in the medicines. People can also take the medications daily for a long-term. And these kind people should avoid the triggers. By using their medical reports, people can get know their triggers and can able to avoid those triggers.

5. The major risk factor that contributes the onset of these conditions are, having allergies like allergic rhinitis called as hay fever, having blood relative with asthma, overweight, smoking, second hand smoke, exhaust fumes and other pollutents.

6. People can try to avoid their allergens like hays, cats, etc., they can were face masks to avoid the pollutents, fumes and smokes.