Asthma is a lung disease that is chronic and it aggravates and tightens the airways of a person. Asthma causes recurring periods of wheezing; which is a whistling sound when a person breathes, tightness in the chest area, as shortness of breath, and coughing. Coughing mostly happens at night time or either early in the morning commonly experiences are chest tightness, difficulty inhaling and exhaling, wheezing, production of large amounts of mucous in their windpipes and coughing. Coughing can be frequent or intermittent, and can be loose reflecting extra mucous secretion in the airways or dry and deep reflecting tight bronchospasms. .
Not all these symptoms occur in every case of asthma. Sometimes people may have coughing without any symptoms for months or even years before it's realized that they are asthmatic. The airways are the tubes that carry air in and out of the lungs. It is difficult for a person who has asthma because their airways are swollen and sensitive, the muscles around the airways become tight and makes the airway narrow. This causes the airflow to the lungs to decrease. The cells in the airway can possibly make more mucus than it usually does, which a thick and sticky substance is causing the airways to narrow even more.
Most may not think of asthma as a killer disease, yet more that 5,000 Americans die of asthma each year. According to the Mayo Clinic web page, asthma also accounts for more than 400,000 hospital discharges annually. Nearly 25 million Americans suffer from asthma "over 8% of adults, over 9% of children, and 60% of asthma cases are allergic asthma". The prevalence of asthma has been increasing since the early 1980s across all age, sex, and racial groups, females 8.1% compared with males 6.2%. The main reason female's percentage is higher than males are that females' body goes through so much changes that they tend to have respiratory problems.