For the question, can Facebook cause asthma attacks, the answer is yes it can, among certain susceptible asthma sufferers.
An 18 year old apparently logged on to his Facebook account and found that his girlfriend had friend-ed many other men and this triggered an asthma attack.
Psychological stress is often one of the key triggers to an asthma attack. Parasympathetic or sympathetic dysregulatio is seen among those asthmatics that are depressed and subject to a stressful situation.
The journal Lancet reported that the young man had been on inhaled steroidal drugs that were required to be taken twice a day in order to keep his asthma under control. His condition however began to deteriorate when he was dumped by his girlfriend in real time, flowed by un-friending him on Facebook as well.
Using an assumed alias, he once again became friends with his ex on FB; however even the sight of her pictures were stressful for him and tended to exacerbate his condition. There was repeated shortness of breath noted whenever he accessed her profile and saw how many male friends she had.
His mother found that there has a variability of more than 20% the peak expiratory flow before and after his Facebook login. When he stopped logging into FB, the asthma attacks stopped.
