Doctor Examination
Your doctor will listen to your breathing and look for signs of asthma or allergies.
Your doctor will probably use a device called a spirometer (speh-ROM-et-er) to check your airways. This test is called spirometry (speh-ROM-eh-tree). The test measures how much air and how fast you can blow air out of your lungs after taking a deep breath. The results will be lower than normal if your airways are inflamed and narrowed, as in asthma, or if the muscles around your airways have tightened up. As part of the test, your doctor may give you a medication that helps relax airway muscles and to open up narrowed airways to see if it changes or improves your test results. Spirometry is also used to check your asthma over time to see how you are doing or are responding to changes in asthma medications
If your spirometry results are normal but you have asthma symptoms, your doctor will probably want you to have other tests to see what else could be causing your symptoms. One test commonly used is a bronchial challenge test. A substance such as methacholine, which causes narrowing of the airways that is very similar to an asthma attack, is inhaled. The effect is measured by spirometry. Children under age 5 usually cannot use a spirometer successfully. If spirometry cannot be used, the doctor may decide to try medication for a while to see if the child's symptoms get better.
Besides spirometry, your doctor may also recommend that you have:
* Allergy testing to find out if and what allergens affect you
* A hand-held peak flow meter to use every day for 1-2 weeks to check your breathing (a peak flow meter is a device that shows how well you are breathing)
* A test to see how your airways react to exercise
* Tests to see if you have gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD)
* Test to see if you have sinus disease.
Other tests, such as a chest x-ray or an electrocardiogram, may be needed to find out if a foreign object, or other lung diseases or heart disease could be causing asthma symptoms. A correct diagnosis is important because asthma is treated differently from other diseases with similar symptoms.
Depending on the results of your physical exam, medical history, and lung function tests, your doctor can determine how severe your asthma is. This is important because your asthma severity will determine how your asthma should be treated and with what medications you will need to take to control your symptoms. A general way to classify severity is to consider how often a person has symptoms when that person is not taking any medicine or when his or her asthma is not well controlled.