Every since I was a small kid, asthma has always been a problem. I've had many a sleepless night because of weezing and inhaler of empty, which is a horror that I wouldn't wish on anyone. Also just waking up to the realisation that one can't breathe, even with the inhaler nearby, ain't fun.

The article on outdoor air pollution that I reposted had me thinking. I've had moderately bad asthma my entire life. I've always needed to have a rescue inhaler near me at all times. For half of the year, since aged ten or do, I've needed a steroidal inhaler, otherwise I'd be hitting the rescue inhaler all day. But something happened around some unspecified time in the last few years that my asthma just disappeared. Fuck I wish I could pinpoint the year, it's just something that happened without notice, and I chalked it up to "people grow out of asthma".

Since 2020, I've been consistently doing the n95 thing, as well as nearly always having a HEPA filter on around me when indoors.

I guess I'm curious how likely it is I grew out of asthma vs just cleaner air. I wish I could have more data on my symptom timeline, but those memories are just a blur.

As a mod of c/covid, I promise that no one will get banned for saying "nah people do grow out of asthma".

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[–] leftAF@hexbear.net 7 points 2 months ago

I know one person who essentially did "grow out" of asthma, they always had an inhaler on them growing up but sometime in their mid-20s I noticed they were never using it and eventually I asked them and all attacks had stopped for >3 years by that point. I'm also aware of someone who died from an asthma attack in their 20s. It's plausible to me that it could effectively go away though - if someone was being exposed to a fairly consistent baseline amount of airborne pollutants for much of their life, and then for whatever reason was primarily breathing significantly cleaner air for long enough.

Everything respiratory is weird, sinuses especially. I personally cured my lifelong chronic sinusitis through an hour of hard intermittent humming 4x a week and playing 100Hz tones into my sinus cavities to manipulate the pressures. Somebody from Hanoi, VN that I met was unable to exist outside for decades of their life without masks due to breathing problems, lived in another part of the world and was able to return to Hanoi without issues for a decade+.