Does Vitamin A Help Prevent or Treat Asthma?
There had been some previous speculation that vitamin A may help to either treat or prevent asthma from occurring. There sure has been a lot of stuff about asthma in the news lately.
The reason for the vitamin A connection to a potential treatment or preventive medicine against asthma is that this vitamin is crucial to healthy lung development and maintenance of this very important organ.
Our lungs oxygenate our blood with the oxygen we breathe in and process through them. They filter out all the junk and help us to maintain a healthy respiratory system overall.
Probably because the summer time and the coming fall are some of the toughest seasons for us asthma sufferers because of all the excitement, physical activity, and of course, the many many allergy inducing things that hang in the air, on the ground, and all around us in the summer time when everything is in full bloom and plant derived allergens become more saturated in the environments that surround us.
The thought about vitamin A was that if doses were given to pregnant women, or to young preschool aged children, it may help prevent them from getting asthma, or perhaps even help reduce symptoms if they already had the lung condition.
Well, unfortunately the effort has thus far been proven fruitless, and vitamin A has not shown any real, significant benefit for those with asthma. What the vitamin A supplementation did seem to do however, was to increase likelihood of survival of the fetus.
The reason for this was that it seemed to increase the size of the lungs of the infant born to the women who took the vitamin A supplements. So in one respect, it did help. However, the vitamin did not prove successful as a remedy for asthma.
It may be that although this vitamin is crucial to lung development and healthy lung tissue, it doesn’t target the exact causation of asthma. There are many different theories behind why people develop asthma, and just improving the actual lung health may not work, although it may provide other related benefits.