Hi everybody, I'm Richard, Asthma UK's web editor. Just a quick post to point you towards our new fact file that addresses the needs of people with anxiety & asthma. This fact file was created partly in response to concerns raised in these forums, so we hope a lot of you will find it useful.
You can find by going to the 'All about asthma' section and clicking on Factfiles.
I read this and thought that generally it was really good. I've been in a situation once of someone thinking I was having a panic attack not an asthma attack and that was really frightening because I couldn't talk, I couldn't get help and I couldn't explain what was going on (which of course led to panic...)
Anyway, I had one little concern with this leaflet. In the section where it details symptoms of an asthma attack, symptoms common to both and symptoms of a panic attack, I was quite concerned by the 'asthma attack' symptoms, just thinking about my own - they're listed as: cough, wheeze and low peak flow. Well for me, I don't wheeze, I don't always cough (sometimes I can't get enough breath to cough - in fact not coughing is more worrying than coughing for me) and my peak flow is normally very high, so low is relative, and I can suddenly drop very quickly - by the time it's low it's too late. I'm not sure who would read this fact file, but it just concerned me that an asthma attack may be thought of as a panic attack if following these lists as they are. I wondered what others thought?
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