WHAT IS COPD?
CHRONIC OBSTRUCTIVE PULMONARY DISEASE IS SHORTLY CALLED AS COPD. IT IS A DISEASE CAUSED TO LUNGS. BRONCHITIS AND EMPHYSEMA WERE PREVIOUSLY USED TERMS FOR THIS DISEASE.
What happens if it occurs?
In this type of disease people often feel discomfort while breathing. The air passage through the lungs won’t be normal, and the person tries hard to have a normal breath.
What are its symptoms?
Its symptoms are mostly that of breath shortness, cough, and sputum (liquid which comes out when coughed). This is a disease in which a person can get into the worst situation if not treated properly. This spread as quick as a forest fire.
What is Sputum?
It is important for people to know about what sputum exactly is. This is a semi-liquid that comes out from the food pipe when we cough a lot. A good sputum consists of less saliva and but an affected sputum always contains bacteria, white blood cells, mucus, pus and many other ailments which produce a foul smell. The bad sputum always doesn’t mean that it is COPD there may be other reasons for this too.
How Much Time Does it Effect?
This varies upon the seriousness of the disease for few people it starts with normal bronchitis which comes for every year for 2 years. This can be a lifetime illness like a cough which never ends mostly like a dry cough. We can see people who are affected with a disease to cough a lot always, and this happens continuously. They even release sputum which is not secreted in a normal dry cough.
What are the major causes of COPD?
There are actually many causes for this disease. Let us see that are those.
- Smoking Tobacco: Smoking tobacco always leads us into troubles. This tobacco goes into the lungs of a healthy human being and spoils them to a bad extent. This happens because when a person smokes the tobacco air goes into the lungs to get filtered and come back same like normal air, in this process the dirt get collected in the lungs and that doesn’t let the lungs to work properly and thus cause COPD disease.
- Air Pollution: This is the most commonly prevailing cause for many diseases in recent days. It is all because of the pollutants that are present in the air. These pollutants are really harmful to a person in many ways. This is the same process as smoking, as when we take in the air, it goes into lungs and all the dirt particles gets fixed up there in the lungs. This slowly reduces the efficiency of working of the lungs. This leads to COPD as we can’t take breath normally and we get short of breath.
- Genes: Unlike from the outside worlds this disease can be inherited from parents too. As this is a chronic disease, there is the lot of chances that the children get this disease from any of the parents or even probably from anyone in the family. This, however, can’t be stopped, so it will be better if we try to treat it in an early stage.
SOURCE: https://lunginstitute.com/blog/copd-affects-the-body/
