English Transcript
Allergist Amar Dixit: When you come in for an asthma screening, we’re going to want to learn more about how your life is going and how it’s going in terms of your breathing. Are you having shortness of breath? Are you having wheezing? Are you having tightness in your chest when you try to breathe? Are you waking up at nighttime because you’re short of breath? Are you not able to exercise the way you want to? Are you not able to do all the activities that you want to do because your breathing isn’t good?
So, we’re going to ask you a lot of questions about that. And then we’re going to go ahead and we’re going to measure and better understand how your lungs are functioning. And the way that we do that is a few different ways.
One, we’re going to listen to your lungs to see if you have any wheezing or any bronchi or any sounds that are occurring as you’re breathing in and out. We’re going to order some breathing tests. Those breathing tests measure the different volumes of your lungs. The two common breathing tests are spirometry and pulmonary function testing.
Once we’ve better understood your lung function and we better understood your lung volumes, the last thing that we’re going to do is we’re going to order blood testing. And we order that blood testing to better understand the potential inflammatory mediators or inflammatory markers that may be leading to some of your breathing symptoms and your asthma symptoms.
And two of the ones that we think are important, one is called eosinophils. That’s a type of immune cell. And the other is called IgE, which is a type of allergy molecule in the body. So we really do three different things. We look at your symptoms. We measure your volumes of your lungs and your lung capacity. And then lastly, we look at your blood to see if there are any inflammatory markers in it.
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Resource Type: Video | Asthma, Asthma & Breathing Problems, Asthma Symptoms
