Keep Your Home Free of Allergens
Tiny organisms and particles that can trigger asthma symptoms are found everywhere. While you'll never be able to totally eradicate them, you can find ways to substantially decrease their numbers within each room of your home.
But before you take aim, check with your child's health care provider to see exactly what triggers might be causing his asthma symptoms. These should be included on your child's asthma action plan completed by his health care provider.
Eradicating these allergens, though, will involve some tough decisions — such as whether to ban a pet from a room or a house. It may mean replacing carpeting, draperies, and upholstered furniture with materials and fabrics that are easier to clean and maintain. Or, it may mean changing the way items such as toys, clothes, or shoes are stored and maintained, or looking at how the air is cleaned and humidified in your house.
These are issues that you and your child will need to discuss so you can come to an understanding of what the culprits are — and how they should be addressed. It also will take multiple efforts throughout your home — generally on a room-by-room basis — to get effective results. Not all results will be seen immediately; for example, it can take weeks to months for pet dander to be minimized in a house despite your best efforts.
A Multifaceted Approach
While taking one step — for instance, eradicating the presence of dust mites in your child's bedroom — can be helpful, research has shown that multiple steps throughout a home can have an even stronger impact.
Removing various allergens from the home was found to be effective in reducing symptoms among children (ages five to eleven years) with moderate to severe asthma — specifically if a multipronged approach was used, according to a 2004 study from the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The study examined the children's sensitivity to certain indoor allergens and evidence of exposures at home to known asthma triggers, including tobacco smoke, dust mites, cockroaches, pets, rodents, and mold.
The study focused on educating the families, who lived in seven inner-city areas, about how to reduce all allergens to which a child was found to be sensitive. The families were assisted with other measures such as using allergen-impermeable covers for their children's bedding and air purifiers with HEPA (high-efficiency particulate air) filters in key locations within their homes, including the children's bedrooms. Cockroach extermination home visits also were provided for those allergic to cockroach allergens.
The greater the drop in household cockroach or dust mite allergen levels, the greater the reduction in asthma symptoms — suggesting that the allergy-reducing measures can make a difference, the researchers said. Also, the benefits of the home intervention occurred quickly: The researchers found a significant drop in symptoms just two months after the study began.
The researchers also noted that earlier studies that focused on controlling a single allergen or tobacco smoke met with limited success. Since many children with asthma are usually sensitive to more than one allergen, taking a multifaceted, home-based approach showed promising results that families can achieve by using recommended practices of allergen reduction every day.
Fact
Children in the group in which educational/preventive measures were used to reduce multiple household allergens were found to have far fewer asthma symptoms compared with a control group: an average of twenty-one fewer days of asthma symptoms in the first year and an average of sixteen fewer days during the follow-up year.
Taking Aim at Triggers
These allergens can be found just about everywhere in your home. And, while you can't see them with the naked eye, they are there — often hidden in the dust. The National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS), a part of NIH, describes house dust as a “component of who you are” — not just dirt but “a mixture of potentially allergenic materials,” such as: fibers, food particles, mold spores, pollens, dust mites, plant and insect parts, hair, animal fur and feathers, dried saliva and urine from pets, and flakes of human and animal skin.
The allergens most likely to be considered asthma triggers within that dust come from:
Cockroaches, which are considered to have the greatest impact on childhood asthma in many American cities. Cockroach allergens appear to come from several sources such as saliva, fecal material, secretions, shed skins, and dead bodies.
Dust mites, or more specifically, the feces of dust mites, which are microscopic relatives of the spider and live on mattresses, bedding, upholstered furniture, carpets, and curtains. These tiny creatures feed on the flakes of skin that people and pets shed daily and they thrive in warm and humid environments.
Pets and animals, which have allergens that are actually proteins secreted by oil glands and shed as dander, proteins in saliva that may stick to fur when animals lick themselves, and aerosolized urine from rodents and guinea pigs.
Molds, which produce tiny spores and can be found almost anywhere.
Endotoxins, which are chemicals produced by bacteria.
And beyond the dust are triggers in the air that also could make your child's asthma worse such as secondhand smoke from cigarettes, cigars, and pipes; wood smoke or particulate matter that gets in the air from fireplace or woodstove use; nitrogen dioxide, an odorless gas from improperly vented fuel-burning appliances that can irritate eyes, noses, and throats and may cause shortness of breath; and chemical irritants that are found in some products in your home such as cleaners, paints, adhesives, pesticides, cosmetics, or air fresheners.
