Cardiac asthma

Patients with left-sided heart failure may experience asthma-like symptoms, like dyspnoea, wheezing, and coughing, which may be called cardiac asthma. Differentiating cardiac and bronchial asthma is usually not a problem.

Patients with cardiac asthma usually have other symptoms of heart failure, the presence of cardiac risk factors, frothy sputum when coughing, are older, have abnormal ECG, chest x-ray, etc. They usually don’t have allergy, and spirometry does not show the characteristic features of bronchial asthma.