The psychological stress that people may feel when using Facebook and other social media could worsen asthma symptoms, Italian doctors say.
This week's issue of the medical journal The Lancet describes the case of an 18-year-old man who was depressed after his girlfriend broke up with him. The man appeared to have various asthma attacks brought on by logging into Facebook for updates about her.
Psychological stress is known to cause asthma attacks, Dr. Gennaro D'Amato of the High Speciality Hospital in Naples and colleagues said.
In this case, the girl had erased him from her list of Facebook friends and "friended" many new young men. The patient used a new nickname to become her friend again, but the sight of her picture seemed to induce difficult breathing in him, the doctors said.
"The temporal relation with onset of symptoms suggests that [the] Facebook log-in was the trigger of asthma exacerbations, in which hyperventilation might play a key role," the doctors wrote.
Doctors advised the man's mother to ask him to measure his breathing before and after he was on Facebook. The authors found more than a 20 per cent difference.
The man consulted with a psychiatrist and decided to stop using Facebook. The asthma attacks stopped.
Before the breakup, the patient took a steroid twice a day as well as the oral drug montelukast for his asthma symptoms, except in the summer when exposure to dust-mite triggers is lower in Italy.
Asthma control key
This case indicates that Facebook, and social networks in general, could be a new source of psychological stress, representing a triggering factor for exacerbations in depressed asthmatic individuals," the doctors said.
They suggested their colleagues consider this type of trigger when assessing exacerbations of asthma.
But the man's breathing problems could have been hyperventilation, rather than an asthma attack, said Toronto-based Dr. Mark Greenwald, who chairs the medical and science committee of the Asthma Society of Canada.
The man's symptoms worsened before the authors saw him, which means his symptoms weren't as well controlled as possible.
"The long-term control of asthma was the key issue here, not necessarily the specifics of the trigger," Greenwald told The Canadian Press.
"To propose that the specific Facebook trigger is something that should be put among your list of things to look for, no I don't think they have a good case here to make that statement — rather than we do know somebody who's already out of control and they have additional stresses and they start hyperventilating," Greenwald said.
"This could happen with basically anything."
source: CBC News
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