Asthma is a common condition where ones airways tend to become inflamed, constricting some of them closed. This condition can be greatly impacted by the weather. Warm weather causes individuals asthma to get worse as this causes their already inflamed airways to become warmer, causing more inflammation and swelling, leading to a closed airway. These symptoms can onset very quickly and have the ability to be very dangerous. Luckily modern medicine has provided us with ways to combat these symptoms, one of them being an inhaler. This article explained how scientists are working on a way to evaluate an individuals asthma based on the temperature of the air that is exhaled by them.
This was originally introduced due to the idea that inflammation produces heat. To test this they collected a group of children, 41 of those children having asthma, and 16 of those children being completely healthy. These children underwent measurement of lung function and exhaled air temperature. Their results showed that the children with asthma had an exhaled air temperature 3°C higher than the children that did not have asthma. Their data demonstrated that an individuals airway inflammation can be measured using the exhaled air temperature. This can be very beneficial as this is a way of measuring ones condition without the need of being invasive to the patient in the slightest
Piacentini, G.L., Peroni, D., Crestani, E., Zardini, F., Bodini, A., Costella, S. and Boner, A.L. (2007), Exhaled air temperature in asthma: methods and relationship with markers of disease. Clinical & Experimental Allergy, 37: 415-419. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1365-2222.2007.02663.x
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