Chronic Asthma & Bronchitis
While there are patients who just have hay fever and occasional asthma attacks as discrete events and are healthy between pollen or other allergen exposures there is larger group of patients who develop more chronic symptoms. Coughing, shortness of breath and wheezing may occur everyday or most days. Often several medications on a regular schedule are required everyday. With continued antigenic exposure a chronic cell-mediated inflammation takes over. The chronic state is more difficult to characterize and understand. Persistent and recurrent symptoms that require daily medication are suggestive of delayed pattern food allergy. We encourage everyone with chronic or frequently recurrent asthma to try diet revision.
The variable delay of absorption of food antigens and the biphasic asthma response to discrete antigen challenge makes for a confusing variability in the timing of symptom-sequences following food ingestion. Further confusion arises when antigen challenge comes from food eaten everyday and acute responses overly chronic inflammatory activity in a complex and variable system of symptom production.
Bronchitis is an inflammation of the bronchi, the large airways inside the lungs with increased mucus production and cough. Bronchitis can be caused by infections, food allergy, or by exposure to airborne allergens and irritants such as dust, fumes, or cigarette smoke. If caused by a virus, the bronchitis will likely be only temporary. If the exposure to irritants is persistent, then permanent damage to the bronchi, bronchitis may occur. Delayed pattern food allergy can cause chronic bronchitis with cough that is quite mysterious - no-one can guess the cause or identify the cause with tests. Only a trial of diet revision reveals the food cause. Cow's milk allergy is the most common cause of chronic bronchitis ( does not show up on skin tests).
The three basic treatment choices are:
Remove the original cause
Consider asthma to be an allergic disease and look at the air and food supplies for the triggers of asthma. Here is a simple problem-solving approach. If asthmatic; then