The attack might hit as she would dribble the ball down the court.

“My chest gets really tight and you feel like you can’t breathe. You’re just sucking air for all that it’s worth,” Rachel Severance Beurman said.

Beurman, a former Lawrence High School basketball player who recently completed a nursing degree at Washburn University, is among a growing percentage of the population who have asthma.

A recent Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report shows that asthma prevalence rates are on the rise – and that Kansas is ranked No. 15 among the states.

However, a local physician who specializes in asthma and allergies says part of the reason might be that asthma is getting properly diagnosed in more people.

“Back in the olden days they had other terms for respiratory problems,” said Ron Weiner, who is an asthma and allergy specialist. “It was like ‘the grip’ or ‘consumption’ before they ever really had asthma as a choice in terms of diagnosis.”

In more recent years it might be called bronchitis or walking pneumonia or croup, he said.

But if more physicians are starting to diagnose asthma more properly, that’s good news, Weiner said.

“Then those people are more likely to get educated about their disease and get treatment for their disease,” he said.

Highest in Northeast

The CDC report said millions of children are affected by asthma, which is a chronic respiratory disease that brings on attacks of breathing difficulty.

While research has improved about what causes asthma attacks and helped people cope with it, the disease remains a significant health problem, according to the CDC.

The study showed the prevalence rates for children up to age 17 are generally higher in the Northeast region during the period 2001-05. Although it might be tempting to attribute that to climate or air quality, many factors affect prevalence, the report said.

Those include getting symptoms diagnosed correctly for children and taking into account that some racial and ethnic groups have higher prevalence rates, according to the report.

The prevalence rate of asthma among children up to age 17 in Kansas was 8.8 percent, making it No. 15 among the states. However, neighboring states did not have that much higher or lower percentage rates.

For example, Nebraska was ranked 19th, with 8.7 percent prevalence rate; Missouri, 23rd, with 8.6 percent; and Colorado, 25th, with 8.5 percent. Oklahoma was ranked third, with 10.8 percent, and Iowa was ranked 40th, with 7.1 percent.

‘Severely under-diagnosed’

The percentages of the population with asthma might be higher than what the CDC report indicates, based on smaller samples of the population, Weiner said.

“With Kansas being at 8.8 percent, it’s important to know that 15 percent of the U.S. Olympic medal winners have asthma,” he said. “And, if you really think about it, why would 15 percent of the U.S. Olympic medal winners have asthma, but only 8 percent of the general population have asthma? That doesn’t make any sense. So asthma is being severely under-diagnosed. There’s no way that having asthma would give you a 100 percent higher chance of going to the Olympics than someone who didn’t have it.”

Weiner said about 50 percent of people with allergies will have some asthma. He said people with asthma typically cough in the middle of the night. Or they might cough when they are exposed to bitter cold air or strenuous exercise.

Under control

Beurman said Weiner diagnosed her asthma when she was very young. And she learned to cope with it – she was even able to play basketball at the high school and college levels.

Now, at 23, Beurman said she hadn’t used her inhaler for a couple of years, not since she had quit playing basketball and wasn’t doing so much strenuous physical exercise.

When she had a checkup with Weiner on Friday, he told her she could go into remission for a while, but then her asthma might flare up in later years if she caught a cold or respiratory virus.

“I don’t know that it’s something I will be ever truly rid of,” Beurman said.

Learning the signs

Michelle Bernth, vice president of marketing and advocacy for the American Lung Association of the Central States, said researchers still don’t know what leads to asthma.

“The causes and the triggers are very complex,” she said.

Both Bernth and Lesa Roberts, environmental health officer for the Kansas Department of Health and Environment, said an accurate diagnosis is important for treatment.

They stressed the importance of managing asthma through a “medical home,” which is a doctor’s office or clinic where the child can get a history of care.

Roberts said it was very difficult to make diagnoses for children younger than 2, mainly because they can be prone to infections.

“When they’re wheezing, it may be for a lot of reasons,” she said.

Nikki King, director of Health Care Access, 1920 Moodie Road, says she’s personally learning more about asthma – she has a 1-year-old son, Jake, who might have it.

“We’ve been doing breathing treatments for about six months,” King said. “That was a result of finding that every time that he caught a cold, it hung on longer.”

However, King said nothing has been diagnosed for her son.

“It’s still without a label,” she said.