Introduction
Exercise is one of the most common factors triggering cough, dyspnea, or breathing difficulties in otherwise healthy children. This condition is called exercise-induced bronchoconstriction (EIB), a frequent phenomenon among early adolescent athletes. Symptoms of EIB include cough, wheezes, chest tightness, and dyspnea during or after physical education lessons. The number of adolescents suffering from EIB is underestimated and many athletes remain undiagnosed and untreated. In this article we argue that complexity of diagnosing EIB is greater for adolescent athletes than it is for adults, due to a reduced capacity of adolescents to feel and understand symptoms. Furthermore, adolescents experience greater difficulty reporting any such symptoms of EIB to medical authorities. Chronic exposure to bronchospasm factors may be associated with the development of asthma. On the other hand, the beneficial effect of physical effort, especially for children whose symptoms are well-controlled, permits young people to perform physical exercises, even at the elite level1.
The purpose of this review is to draw the attention of the medical community to the problem of EIB and asthma symptoms among adolescent athletes. In the available sources, most data pertains to professional adult athletes, so after analyzing the scientific data of the collected material, the most important issues related to adolescent athletes were listed.