Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) is not curable, but you can manage symptoms with one of the many COPD treatments available. Following COPD treatment guidelines will also extend life expectancy and improve your quality of life.
COPD treatment often starts with drugs called bronchodilators, which relax the muscles around the airways to open them up and make it easier to breathe. Bronchodilators come in two forms. Short-acting bronchodilators start to work within minutes, and keep opening the airways for four to six hours. You take them to get immediate relief when you?re short of breath. If your disease is mild, a short-acting bronchodilator may be the only COPD treatment you need. More severe symptoms may require long-acting bronchodilators. These medicines take longer to start working, but their effects last for up to 24 hours. You will typically take a long-acting bronchodilator every day.
If bronchodilators alone aren?t enough, or you often experience symptom flare-ups, your doctor may prescribe a steroid medicine along with your bronchodilator. You will breathe in your COPD medicines through an inhaler, or use a nebulizer, which turns the medicine into a fine mist that you inhale through a facemask or mouthpiece.
Oxygen therapy and pulmonary rehabilitation are two other important components to COPD treatment. You breathe in oxygen from a canister through a nasal cannula or a mask while you do activities or housework.
Pulmonary rehabilitation is a program that incorporates nutrition, exercise, education, and psychological counseling to help you live better and stay healthier with COPD. The rehabilitation team can include doctors, nurses, physical therapists, psychologists, counselors, dietitians, and other specialists.
As a last resort, if these COPD treatments have not worked, surgery may be an option. Surgery can remove the spaces where air is trapped inside the lungs, or take out diseased sections of the lungs. Once the disease has become very severe, a lung transplant may be necessary.
Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) rehabilitation is a series of education and structured exercises that allow people to make the most of the remaining capacity of their lungs. People with COPD who engage in a rehabilitation program have less shortness of breath, an increased ability to exercise, better quality of … Read More
Even though COPD cannot be cured, it can be treated. COPD treatment is aimed at reducing symptoms, preventing the disease from getting worse, improving the ability to exercise, preventing and treating complications, and preventing and treating exacerbations. Almost every person with COPD will be prescribed a short-acting bronchodilator (either a … Read More
One of the missions of GOLD COPD (Global Initiative for Chronic Obstructive Lung Disease) involves the stages of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. Before diagnosis, a doctor may suspect COPD in anyone with a history of smoking or exposure to environmental irritants. Characteristic lung problem symptoms that accompany COPD include chronic … Read More
You may not have heard of the International Classification of Diseases (ICD), but if you have COPD signs and symptoms, the ICD has heard of you—and it even has a series of code numbers for your diagnosis. Codes like "COPD ICD 9" are becoming more important as the use of … Read More
If you're battling chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and you're still a smoker, you've likely already heard this good advice: Give up cigarettes and you can improve life expectancy with COPD. Nicotine is an addictive substance that acts on regions of the brain that produce pleasurable effects, and it produces these … Read More
Once you’ve been told you have chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), it’s important to find out where you are as far as COPD stages are concerned. COPD stages include mild (Stage 1 COPD), moderate (Stage 2 COPD), severe (Stage 3 COPD), and very severe (Stage 4 COPD). These classifications are … Read More
Giving up the habit of smoking is an essential step for preventing and treating COPD, and can help you avoid COPD complications—but it isn't easy. About 70 percent of adult smokers report that they want to stop completely, but very few succeed in permanently quitting on their first attempt. To … Read More
Emphysema is one contributing factor to COPD signs and symptoms, but it also has its own distinct place in the lung diseases list. What is emphysema? In order to properly answer the question, it helps to understand how our lungs work. For Starters: Lung Facts Inside the lungs, there is … Read More
Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) is a serious respiratory condition that currently has no cure. But COPD treatment can help manage COPD symptoms. Along with medications, which are usually inhaled, dealing with COPD also requires behaviors that support lung health. Understanding COPD COPD is actually a broad term used to … Read More
Knowing the facts about lungs will help you understand why COPD—chronic obstructive pulmonary disease—can be difficult to diagnose until it is quite advanced. The lungs, with more than 300 million alveoli, have an amazing capacity. Not all of these alveoli are used for the day-to-day work of normal breathing—the extra … Read More
