Grant: Master's Award: Canada Graduate Scholarships

Asthma is a chronic airway disease characterized by the walls of the airway narrowing and having inflammation (the process which normally repairs damaged cells in the body but can be dangerous when it goes wrong, as in asthma). This condition affects over 8% of Canadians over the age of 12, with more than half of those people having difficulty controlling their asthma symptoms, despite many using asthma medication. The reasons for this lack of control remain poorly understood. Patients with asthma tend to have more mental health problems (e.g., psychiatric disorders) than the general population and these kinds of problems have been shown to worsen asthma symptoms. For example, panic disorder (PD) is up to six times more common in asthmatics than in the general population. This high rate is thought to be in part due to the fact that asthma and panic attacks have similar characteristic symptoms: anxiety, difficulty breathing, and chest tightness. While this similarity may cause patients and their doctors to misinterpret the nature of an attack (be it asthma or panic), it is also possible that panic attacks may trigger asthma attacks. It is possible that that a sudden stressful event, such as a panic attack, may cause an increase in inflammation, thus worsening the person's asthma. Identifying the links between panic and asthma attacks may lead to better and quicker treatment, and may help doctors distinguish asthma-related and PD-related attacks more effectively, which is particularly important in the Emergency Department. This work may also lead to the development of tools for patients, ultimately helping them to better understand their symptoms as asthma-related or not, which would in turn help them to make better medical decisions (e.g., choosing to go to the Emergency Department or not) and lead to reductions in unnecessary medical use.