Facebook Heartbreak Leads to Man's Asthma Attacks

Nov. 19, 2010— -- Asthmatics beware: What you see on Facebook could leave you breathless.

We often hear that social networks can be good for emotional health by reconnecting us with old friends, helping us build professional contacts and countering isolation, but Italian doctors have reported a case where logging onto Facebook made an 18-year-old man hyperventilate.

The patient, whose asthma was well-controlled with steroid inhalers and Singulair pills, began having more asthma attacks when he logged onto Facebook and learned that his ex-girlfriend had un-friended him and friended "many new young men." Frustrated by being cut off from his former flame, the jilted boyfriend became her Facebook friend under a nickname and regained access to her profile picture.

However, the sight of her photo left him hyperventilating and short of breath, "which happened repeatedly" as he called up her profile, wrote Dr. Gennaro D'Amato, a respiratory and allergy specialist at the High Specialty Hospital A Cardarelli in Naples, Italy, in this week's issue of The Lancet.

In e-mails sent Thursday from Salvador de Bahia, Brazil, where he was traveling, D'Amato said that the case was unique because "there are not other descriptions of psychosomatic asthma induced by contact with Facebook."

With this particular patient, seeing his former girlfriend's photo and becoming aware of her contacts with men he saw as competitors for her attention "was a trigger factor of asthma."

D'Amato and colleagues from another Naples hospital and health centers in Prato, Italy, and Salerno, Italy, wrote that doctors advised the patient's worried Italian mama to have him measure his lung capacity before and after logging into Facebook.

"Indeed, 'post-Facebook' values were reduced, with a variability of more than 20 percent," they wrote.

Psychological stress is a known asthma trigger. In depressed asthmatics, stress can cause their autonomic nervous systems to tighten up their airways.

After ruling out other environmental and infectious factors that could affect this particular patient's airways, the doctors concluded that logging onto Facebook most likely triggered the stress that brought on the asthma attacks.

D'Amato and his co-authors suggested the case had broader implications for some of Facebook's more than 500 million active users: "Facebook, and social networks in general, could be a new source of psychological stress, representing a triggering factor for exacerbations in depressed asthmatic individuals."