SMOKING AND COPD (Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease).
People who smoke cigarettes often use excuses like: peer pressure, to relieve stress, to lose weight, contraction or the mere fact that they like the taste of it.
Whatever the case may be, there are definitely more serious disadvantages of smoking.
Smoking causes various diseases, whether it’s a disease that causes death or not. It causes cancer in the mouth, cancer in the throat and lung cancer. It causes asthma, it makes you age and lowers the ability to exercise. It also causes emphysema.
THERE ARE TWO MAIN TYPES OF COPD (Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Diseases) :
· What is emphysema?
Emphysema is a lung disease caused by smoking.
It is a condition that causes the air sacs of the lungs to be enlarged and damaged, which causes difficulty to breath and breathlessness.
It is also called pulmonary emphysema. It is characterized by the widespread destruction of gas- exchanging tissues of the lungs.
It results to abnormally large air spaces. Emphysema shows loss of alveolar walls and destroys alveolar capillaries.
Thus, the surface accessible for the exchange of oxygen and carbon dioxide between inhaled air and blood transferring the lungs is reduced.
Furthermore, loss of elastic tissue from the walls of the destroyed alveoli causes the lungs to expand within the chest cage.
The expanded lungs compress the small bronchi and thus increases resistance to airflow.
It can be life threatening due to the increase metabolic needs related with poor lung function.
It can increase your metabolic needs by 150%.
However when you have COPD it is often tough to eat for a variety of reasons. These reasons include chest tightness or causes you to be bloated etc.
The symptoms of emphysema include coughing, wheezing, loss of weight, loss of appetite, rapid breathing, intolerance to exercising, poor sleep and depression.
Basically, Emphysema involves damage to the lungs over time.
· What is chronical bronchitis?
Another main form of COPD is Chronic bronchitis.
Chronic bronchitis involves a long-term cough with mucus.
Smoking is the main cause for chronic bronchitis.
It causes difficulty with breathing.
It is difficult to tell the difference between chronic bronchitis and empysema. Both conditions affect breathing processes.
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