Asthma
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40 free Asthma trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Asthma is one of the most widespread long-term conditions in the world, affecting hundreds of millions of people and often starting in childhood. It inflames and narrows the airways, and although there is no cure, the right treatment keeps it under control. This quiz covers the essentials: what happens in the lungs during an attack, the triggers that set symptoms off at home, at school and outdoors, how inhalers and other medicines work, and how doctors test for the condition. It also visits the stranger corners of the story, from ancient remedies to the athletes, writers and leaders who lived with it. It is written for anyone who wants to check what they know: people with asthma and their families, parents of a newly diagnosed child, students, and trivia fans who like health facts with a good story attached. Every answer comes with a short explanation.
30 of 40 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Grimault's Indian Cigarettes, advertised in 1907 as an asthma remedy, contained belladonna and which other plant drug?
Cannabis
Cannabis and belladonna were smoked because herbal smoke was long thought to relieve asthmatics. The habit waned once asthma was understood as an inflammatory reaction of the airways.
Q 02Which kind of weather event overwhelmed Melbourne's ambulances with asthma emergencies on one evening in November 2016?
A thunderstorm
A thunderstorm is thought to burst pollen grains into fragments small enough to reach the lungs. Melbourne's 2016 outbreak, the most severe on record, caused ten deaths.
Q 03Which future US president was a sickly child whose debilitating asthma attacks terrified him and his parents?
Theodore Roosevelt
Theodore Roosevelt fought his frailty with a regime of vigorous exercise that he called the strenuous life. Hiking in the Alps as a boy showed him that exertion eased his attacks.
Q 04Research found that about 70 percent of Britain's elite squad in which Olympic sport had some form of asthma?
Swimming
Swimming topped sports scientist John Dickinson's survey, far above the national asthma rate of eight to ten percent. A third of Team Sky's cyclists had some form of the condition too.
Q 05The metering valve in the first asthma puffer inhalers of the 1950s was originally designed to dispense which product?
Perfume
Perfume was what the metering valve was first built to dispense. Riker Laboratories paired it with a propellant in 1955 to create the first metered-dose inhaler.
Q 06Which everyday stimulant, related to the asthma drug theophylline, improves airway function for up to four hours?
Caffeine
Caffeine in low doses raises a key measure of lung function by 5 to 18 percent in people with asthma. Some people drink coffee or tea to try to ease their symptoms.
Q 07From the 1930s to the 1950s, doctors who considered asthma a psychological illness often prescribed which treatment?
Psychoanalysis
Psychoanalysis was prescribed because analysts read the asthmatic wheeze as a child's suppressed cry for its mother. Asthma was then listed among seven classic psychosomatic illnesses.
Q 08Which revolutionary and trained doctor suffered acute asthma all his life, even while leading guerrilla campaigns?
Che Guevara
Che Guevara still excelled as an athlete and became a tireless cyclist. In Bolivia, most of his last offensives were attempts to obtain medicine for his worsening attacks.
Q 09Which novel about schoolboys stranded on an island features Piggy, who is scorned for his asthma and poor eyesight?
Lord of the Flies
Lord of the Flies makes Piggy's glasses the boys' means of lighting their signal fire. William Golding's debut novel was rejected by many publishers before Faber & Faber accepted it.
Q 10Which creatures, barely visible to the naked eye and feeding on flakes of human skin, are a major indoor asthma trigger?
Dust mites
Dust mites turn up almost everywhere: their allergens were found in the beds of about 84 percent of surveyed American homes. They thrive in humid regions and eat shed skin from people and other animals.
Q 11In the UK, reliever inhalers that quickly open the airways during an asthma attack are often which colour?
Blue
Blue is the usual colour for relievers containing salbutamol, which quickly opens the airways. UK guidance now steers patients toward combination inhalers that also treat the underlying inflammation.
Q 12Which add-on device, sometimes improvised from a plastic bottle, helps more asthma inhaler medicine reach the lungs?
A spacer
A spacer holds the puff in a chamber so it can be breathed in normally, with no need to time a breath to the spray. Some include a whistle that sounds if the user inhales too quickly.
Q 13The asthma reliever salbutamol, launched as Ventolin in 1969, goes by which generic name in the United States?
Albuterol
Q 21The word asthma comes from a Greek term, probably related to the word for wind, that meant what?
Panting
Panting, or shortness of breath, is what the Greek word meant, and English borrowed it through Latin in the late 1300s. Early English spellings such as asma left out the th altogether.
Q 22Which ancient Greek physician is credited with first using asthma as the name of a specific breathing problem?
Hippocrates
Hippocrates gave the condition its name, and Aretaeus of Cappadocia later wrote a classic clinical account of it. Earlier still, ancient Egyptians treated it with an incense drink called kyphi.
Q 23Which 12th-century philosopher and court physician to Saladin wrote a Treatise on Asthma in Arabic?
Maimonides
Albuterol is the United States Adopted Name, while most of the world says salbutamol. A team led by David Jack discovered the drug in 1966 at the Allen and Hanburys laboratory in Hertfordshire.
Q 14Which class of drugs, inhaled every day to calm swollen airways, is the mainstay of asthma preventer inhalers?
Corticosteroids
Corticosteroids damp down the inflammation behind asthma, typically taking one or two weeks to improve symptoms. Guidelines say to start them as soon as the diagnosis is confirmed.
Q 15Which painkiller triggers breathing reactions in people with Samter's triad, a form of asthma with nasal polyps?
Aspirin
Aspirin intolerance, asthma and nasal polyps make up the triad, which affects about 7 percent of asthmatics. Paradoxically, a daily dose after careful desensitization can help manage it.
Q 16Which class of heart and blood-pressure drugs is used with caution in asthma because it can make the airways tighten?
Beta blockers
Beta blockers can block the very receptors that reliever inhalers stimulate to open the airways. US guidelines advise people with asthma against the non-selective kind.
Q 17Which itchy skin condition often appears in infancy ahead of asthma, a sequence doctors call the atopic march?
Eczema
Eczema, known medically as atopic dermatitis, shares risk genes with asthma and hay fever. About 30 percent of people with it carry mutations in the gene for filaggrin, a skin-barrier protein.
Q 18Which handheld device, pioneered by Martin Wright in the 1950s, shows people with asthma how fast they can blow out?
Peak flow meter
A peak flow meter gives readings that asthma plans often sort into green, yellow and red zones. A result under half of a person's usual best signals a medical emergency.
Q 19Which machine uses compressed air or ultrasound to turn liquid asthma medicine into a mist breathed through a mask?
A nebulizer
A nebulizer is common in hospitals for patients who struggle with inhalers, including those having severe attacks. Makers even sell pacifier attachments for infants and toddlers.
Q 20Which hormone, reported as an asthma treatment in 1905, was the drug in one of the first metered-dose inhalers?
Adrenaline
Adrenaline, also called epinephrine, is the body's fight-or-flight hormone and relaxes the airways. Today it is kept for asthma that fails to respond to other treatments.
Maimonides stressed clean air and a suitable climate in his treatise, alongside advice on diet. Its Arabic title was Maqala fi al-Rabw.
Q 24Which Egyptian medical scroll of about 1550 BC advises heating herbs on a brick so asthma patients can inhale the fumes?
Ebers Papyrus
The Ebers Papyrus is among the oldest preserved medical documents and is thought to copy even earlier texts. German Egyptologist Georg Ebers bought it at Luxor in the 1870s.
Q 25Rhinoviruses, a major cause of asthma flare-ups, are best known as the usual cause of which everyday illness?
The common cold
The common cold can be caused by well over 200 virus strains. Viral infections are a major trigger of asthma attacks, which also rise during the back-to-school season in the fall.
Q 26Allergens from which household insects, found even in homes with no visible infestation, are linked with asthma?
Cockroaches
Cockroaches leave detectable allergens in 20 to 48 percent of homes that show no sign of them. One culprit protein, tropomyosin, can also make sufferers react to shrimp.
Q 27Fel d 1, a protein that can set off allergic asthma, comes mainly from the saliva and skin glands of which pets?
Cats
Cats make Fel d 1 largely in their saliva and skin glands, and it causes the allergy in 90 percent of people allergic to them. Some Siberian cats carry gene variants that produce less of it.
Q 28Which idea, first formulated by David Strachan in 1989, links fewer early-childhood infections to rising asthma rates?
Hygiene hypothesis
The hygiene hypothesis grew from Strachan's view that smaller families and cleaner homes gave children too little exposure to microbes. It does not claim that more infections are good overall.
Q 29On which South Atlantic island, settled by just a few families, do about half the residents have asthma?
Tristan da Cunha
Tristan da Cunha is considered the most remote inhabited place in the world. Studies of its closely related families by Toronto researcher Noe Zamel led to discoveries about the genetics of asthma.
Q 30A FeNO test, used to gauge airway inflammation in asthma, measures the level of which gas in exhaled breath?
Nitric oxide
Nitric oxide runs higher in the breath of people with asthma than in other people. Because it tracks airway inflammation, the measurement has been dubbed an inflammometer.