question about asthma / 'the hand that rocks the cradle'

[unblock]

i just caught a snippet from the movie 'the hand that rocks the cradle' in which someone comes across a dead body (i presume someone she knows), which triggers an asthma attack. she tries to use an inhaler, but rebecca de mornay has cruelly emptied it.

question: can the stress of seeing a dead body trigger an asthma attack? i would have thought that the adrenaline released from such a situation would be more likely to prevent an attack than to cause it. after all, adrenaline/epinephrine (or a variant/precursor) is essentially the emergency treatment for such attacks.

or am i thinking about this all wrong?

it's not listed as a 'goof' in www.imdb.com, but then, there's not much there for this movie.

[TimeChaser]

1. One thing...

I don't know about other people and other medicine, but using my inhaler in the middle of a full blown attack doesn't work very well. It works best if I use it as soon as it starts getting hard to breathe.

[unblock]

2. right -- in the middle of an attack, you're not inhaling properly

and thus not getting the inhaled medicine in properly. this is one of the reasons emts are trained to try to calm the asthma patient down when assisting them with their inhaler. it's also a reason why a nebulizer/spacer can help.

[libodem]

3. reactive airway disease...

stress constricts the airway. I'm just taking a stab at this question as I'm not a doctor and I'm not looking anything up but I suspect it's the same with exercised induced asthma the reaction to stress on the body must constrict things and makes it hard to have effective air exchanges. If a person is already wheezing it seems even an inhaler would not be as efficient at opening the air passages after the fact as opposed to using some Albuterol to prevent the onset.

[Spacemom]

4. From my experience dealing with my son's asthma

Yes, stress can trigger an attack. Even adrenlin producing stress can narrow airways.