This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1913 Excerpt: ...equally beyond doubt is the presence of a vascular element, a turgescence, in many if not in the majority of cases of asthma. The injected condition of the tracheal mucosa during asthma I have already mentioned, and this is bound to extend lower down into the bronchi. It is fair criticism to say that this may be the ...
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This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1913 Excerpt: ...equally beyond doubt is the presence of a vascular element, a turgescence, in many if not in the majority of cases of asthma. The injected condition of the tracheal mucosa during asthma I have already mentioned, and this is bound to extend lower down into the bronchi. It is fair criticism to say that this may be the result, not the cause, of the dyspnoea and coughing; but as we have seen in preceding chapters, even in typical asthma, there are vascular phenomena (urticaria, erythema, petechiae, Raynaud's symptoms) and the symptoms are more like catarrh, and less like spasm in atypical asthma--the apyretic recurrent bronchitis of children, which is admittedly asthma, the paroxysmal pulmonary oedema of the adult which may alternate with it. Laryngismus stridulus, we have seen, shades into laryngitis stridulosa, and in the next chapter we shall see that paroxysmal sneezing and rhinitis are largely due to the same toxaemic conditions that produce asthma. So struck was Gee by "the catarrh which manifestly attends most, if not all, asthmatic seizures " that he relegated spasm to quite a subordinate position and adopted the hypothesis of " pneumonic asthma." Asthmatic attacks often end with profuse expectoration. If toxaemia result in spasm of the bronchial tubes, why should it not also result in spasm of the bronchial arteries which, coming from the systemic circulation, ramify to the uttermost bronchioles and are under vasomotor control? Why should there not result here the same peculiar vascular condition as in the urticaria, which so often besets the skin of asthmatics? We may still ask the same question if we adopt recent views as to urticaria being a direct action of toxin on vessel wall. Tlalsted reports the case of a young girl of 15, w...
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