Word: asthma
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Elite athletes may be the epitome of health and fitness, but their workout-induced glow could be hiding a problem deep in their lungs. A new study of college athletes at Ohio State University (OSU) finds that young sports stars suffer from exercised-induced asthma much more than previously thought...
Researchers studied 107 athletes from 22 different sports at OSU - the university's 36 varsity-level sports make it one of the country's largest college athletic departments - and found that nearly 40% suffered from exercised-induced asthma, a breathing disorder triggered by physical exertion. Surprisingly, 86% of these asthma sufferers had no prior history of asthma of any kind, and the researchers found no significant difference in prevalence between so-called high-ventilation sports such as running and lower-ventilation sports such as baseball...
...results mirror earlier findings that suggest Olympic level athletes can have as much as a five times greater chance of suffering from exercise-induced asthma as the general population. While it's not clear why intense exercise is linked with greater asthma incidence, experts believe that the large volume of air brought into and out of the lungs during exertion can dehydrate the airways, triggering an inflammatory cascade of immune cells that causes air passages to constrict. "Athletes who are exercising strenuously are losing heat and water vapor in their airways, so they are more prone to developing exercise-induced...
Alternatively, says study author Dr. Jonathan Parsons, it could be that exercise-induced asthma represents the mildest end of an asthma continuum, and that these athletes are actually asthma sufferers who experience their symptoms only during intense exercise. "No one knows for sure," he says, "but we are now looking at people who have exercise-induced asthma and investigating the inflammatory cascade that happens in the airway, comparing people who have been diagnosed with [non-exercise-induced] asthma to people who don't have asthma, to understand what makes them different or the same...
...growing socioeconomic disparities in terms of obesity and asthma," Gortmaker said. "And my sense is that these disparities will continue for a whole range of reasons...