Question: Why do allergy sufferers (eg pollen and animal hair) get tight chests?

Stefan Piatek answered on 15 Mar 2013:

Good question. The short answer is because their bodies react to things like pollen or animal hair like it’s something dangerous. This doesn’t normally happen but for some reason, the fighter cells start to think that they are an infection.

We’re very clean in the west, we don’t get many infections, which is normally great – the problem is that we’ve evolved to fight against infections a lot (the ones who didn’t would have died!). There’s an idea that after a while, the fighter cells in some people just go a little bit bored and start thinking that this normal pollen is something infecting you.

Now why their chest gets tight is because your fighter cells make all kinds of things, they’re sort of like hormones that they release, and these cause your airway muscle to contract and make the flow of air difficult – so your chest gets tight and it’s hard to breathe.

Let me know if that makes sense!