Asthma is a chronic disease that causes your airways to become inflamed, making it hard to breathe.
You probably know the common symptoms of asthma, like shortness of breath, wheezing and coughing. But did you know there are other respiratory illnesses with similar symptoms?
Diagnosing asthma can be trickier than you think. There is no single test to determine if you have asthma. To make a diagnosis, your doctor will look at your symptoms and may perform some physical tests.
In some cases, people are misdiagnosed with asthma when they actually have a different condition. Recently, researchers studied more than 600 adults diagnosed with asthma in the past 5 years. They found that about one-third of them didn’t truly have asthma.1
If you are on a treatment plan for asthma but the treatment doesn’t seem to be working, you might not have asthma. Or you may need a different type of asthma medicine.
When it comes to managing your health, you want the best treatment possible. This means you have to start by getting the right diagnosis for your symptoms.
It might be obvious, but for asthma treatments to work, you truly need to have asthma. If you’ve been misdiagnosed, you might be trying to treat a condition you don’t have – and at the same time possibly ignoring a condition you really have!
Work with your doctor to get the right diagnosis. If you’ve been told you have asthma but have not had objective testing, see a board-certified allergist, immunologist or pulmonologist to get tested and properly diagnosed.
