Treatment
Further information: Asthma#TreatmentAs with any asthma, the best treatment is avoidance of conditions predisposing to attacks, when possible. In athletes who wish to continue their sport or do so at times in adverse conditions, preventive measures that can be taken include altered training techniques and medications.
Some athletes take advantage of the refractory period by precipitating an attack by "warming up," and then timing their competition such that it occurs during the refractory period. Step-wise training works in a similar fashion. An athlete warms up in stages of increasing intensity, using the refractory period generated by each stage to get up to a full workload.
Concerning medication, it should be recognized that treatment of EIB has been extensively studied in asthmatic subjects over the last 30 years, but not so in athletes with EIB. Thus, it is not known whether athletes with EIB or ‘sports asthma’ respond similarly to subjects with classical allergic or nonallergic asthma. However, there is no evidence supporting different treatment for EIB in asthmatic athletes and nonathletes.
The most common medication approach is to use a beta agonist about twenty minutes before exercise. Some physicians prescribe inhaled anti-inflammatory mists such as corticosteroids or leukotriene antagonists, and mast cell stabilizers have also proven effective. A randomized crossover study compared oral montelukast with inhaled salmeterol, both given two hours before exercise. Both drugs had similar benefit but montelukast lasted 24 hours.
Read more about this topic: Exercise-induced Asthma
Famous quotes containing the word treatment:
“Our treatment of both older people and children reflects the value we place on independence and autonomy. We do our best to make our children independent from birth. We leave them all alone in rooms with the lights out and tell them, “Go to sleep by yourselves.” And the old people we respect most are the ones who will fight for their independence, who would sooner starve to death than ask for help.”
—Margaret Mead (1901–1978)
“A regular council was held with the Indians, who had come in on their ponies, and speeches were made on both sides through an interpreter, quite in the described mode,—the Indians, as usual, having the advantage in point of truth and earnestness, and therefore of eloquence. The most prominent chief was named Little Crow. They were quite dissatisfied with the white man’s treatment of them, and probably have reason to be so.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“James’s great gift, of course, was his ability to tell a plot in shimmering detail with such delicacy of treatment and such fine aloofness—that is, reluctance to engage in any direct grappling with what, in the play or story, had actually “taken place”Mthat his listeners often did not, in the end, know what had, to put it in another way, “gone on.””
—James Thurber (1894–1961)