Inviting friends or asthma?

New Delhi, Nov. 19: A teenager in Italy who had asthma exacerbations after he saw a former girlfriend acquire new “friends” on Facebook has prompted doctors to question whether social networking websites may be a trigger for asthma.

Four Italian doctors have said the case of the 18-year-old boy indicates that online social networks in general could be a source of psychological stress that might serve as a “trigger” for exacerbations in depressed asthmatic persons.

The boy’s asthma symptoms had been under control with twice-a-day inhaler medicine and a daily oral medication which he took round the year except during the summer months, the doctors have said, in a correspondence that appeared in the journal Lancet today.

But his symptoms had worsened in the months just before he met the doctors. Investigations suggested that his asthma worsened after he used the social networking website.

The doctors learned from his mother that his girlfriend had broken up with him, and deleted him from her list of Facebook friends, leaving him depressed. But the boy used a nickname to rejoin her list of friends where, he found, she had other young men as her new friends.

The doctors studied his maximum speed of exhalation — a standard test for exacerbations of asthma — and found his performance lower after sessions on the social networking site. This suggests that the login was the trigger of exacerbations, the doctors wrote.

“We know this is a single case — but we decided to bring it to the notice of the medical community because (sessions on) online social networking sites are not usually considered when doctors question patients with uncontrolled asthma,” said Lorenzo Cechhi, a clinical immunologist and allergy specialist at a hospital in Prato, Italy, and a co-author of the correspondence in the Lancet.

“Our case suggests that online networking may sometimes contribute to stress,” Cechhi told The Telegraph. The doctors wrote that the boy’s asthma exacerbations did not appear linked to any other possible factors such as environmental triggers or infections.

The doctors said that after the boy consulted a psychiatrist and agreed not to login to the social networking site, his asthma exacerbations stopped. Doctors have known for long that psychological stress is a possible risk factor for asthma attacks.

Social networking sites allow people to follow friends and track some activities online. In a blog in July this year, Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg wrote that 500 million people are actively using Facebook to stay connected with friends and people around them.

Independent studies in the past have shown that social networking sites can deliver educational benefits as well as help improve the health of consumers. Two years ago, a research team at the University of Minnesota in the US had found that social networking enabled students to acquire technology skills.

Another study by researchers at the Case Western University in the US had found that appropriate use of social networking has the potential to pick up information about health that individuals could use to their advantage. The study found that with the right information, they could empower themselves to take decisions to improve health.

Several clinical psychologists in India said they had not encountered any patient with stress following sessions on social networking websites. “But I do see adolescents who use social networking as substitutes for real friendships,” said Saptarishi Adhikari, a clinical psychologist in Calcutta.

A psychotherapy practitioner in Mumbai said she had last year seen a 24-year-old woman with symptoms of depression that appeared to be linked to a social networking site. “She had seen that her boyfriend had invited some of her own friends (on the network),” said Veena Chakravarthy, a clinical psychologist in Mumbai. “She felt she was losing her own friends and the relationship wasn’t working out.”