COPD and asthma are lung ailments. Asthma and COPD can both give rise to similar symptoms, and are sometimes treated with the same medicines. Both conditions can lead to variable breathlessness, wheezy breathing, coughing, and mucus production. Some medicines prescribed for the treatment of asthma, such as inhaled β2 agonists, corticosteroid inhalers, and theophylline, for [...]

Asthma is a specific lung disease that is different from emphysema and chronic obstructive bronchitis. COPD is often used as a kind of shorthand to describe emphysema, chronic obstructive bronchitis, or a combination of both. COPD always refers to diseases that are not asthma. The COPD group of lung diseases is not related to asthma, [...]

COPD is an acronym for the term  chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. Chronic obstructive pulmonary dis-ease is a descriptive term rather than a single disease, although it usually is used to refer to emphysema or to chronic obstructive bronchitis. Technically, COPD refers in a general way to several different lung conditions that demonstrate an abnormality on [...]

Yes, depending, of course, on what your exact symptoms are. Medical students and physicians in specialty training are taught the skill of differential diagnosis. When reviewing and analyzing a patient’s report of symptoms, the physician generates a list of different possible conditions that could theoretically be responsible for the symptoms. That list of possible conditions [...]

The presence of a persistent cough is always abnormal. There are many reasons why cough may develop. Each one of us has experienced a cough at some point in our lives, when ill with a respiratory infection or a head cold, for example. Most coughs due to the common cold are short lived and tend [...]

No, not necessarily. The to-and-fro movement of air through the lungs and tracheobronchial tree should always be silent. A wheeze is an abnormal sound produced by turbulent flow of air through the lungs. There are many different causes of wheezing The occurrence of a wheeze by itself without any other symptoms is unusual. It is [...]

Gemma’s comment: In my teens, I attended a boarding school in northern New York State. I found that in winter I could always develop a noisy wheeze if I opened a window and took big gulps of cold air. The choking cough and noisy breathing that followed was enough to get me excused from what [...]

A wheeze is the sound generated when air travels though a breathing passage (airway) that has become narrowed. The narrowing can be due to mucus secretions trapped within the airway or to the airway muscles’ constriction or tightening around the airway. The airway narrowing due to asthma is reversible. Medications prescribed for asthma help the [...]

Asthma is characterized by periods of exacerbations and remission of symptoms, as mentioned briefly in Contemporary View Of Asthma. During a remission of asthma, symptoms are well controlled and measurements of lung function normalize. An exacerbation of asthma, on the other hand, refers to an increase in lung inflammation and rep-resents a period of increased [...]

Medical textbooks correctly inform us that “classic” symptoms of asthma are three in number: wheezing, cough, and abnormal sensations of breathing, or dyspnea. If you are studying for a knowledge test, mark those three symptoms on your answer sheet. You will get full credit for the right answers and will surely score an A for [...]

In the past, asthma was considered a disease principally of airway narrowing, termed  bronchoconstriction. In the traditional view, bronchial passages encircled by specialized muscle fibers became narrowed (constricted), leading in turn to the development of an “asthma attack.” The traditional explanation erroneously emphasized that constriction of the bronchial tubes was the primary, underlying event in [...]

The hygiene hypothesis is a theory that attempts to explain the increased prevalence of allergy and asthma in affluent, industrialized nations. It also strives to elucidate factors that are responsible for the development of asthma in individuals. The British epidemiologist David Strachan advanced the beginnings of the hypothesis in 1989 after studying the health records [...]

As mentioned in causes asthma, the development of asthma is thought to arise from complex and poorly understood interactions involving a person’s inborn genetic characteristics and elements of the environment in which he or she lives, from birth onward. Each of us is endowed with a specific set of genes, inherited from our parents, and [...]

Allergy and asthma are two separate medical conditions, despite the fact that asthma often co-exists with a diagnosis of allergy, especially in children and in teenagers. The development of asthma reflects a particular genetic or innate predisposition  to the disease. In addition, environmental influences have been recognized as  significant in the emergence of clinical asthma. [...]

Asthma is believed to result from a complex interplay between a person’s genes and various environmental fac-tors at a specific time in his or her life. It can thus be viewed as the result of interactions that occur between internal (genetic) elements and external (environmental) exposures. Environmental factors that have been studied include viruses such [...]

Yes, our lungs continue to grow and develop after we are born. In particular, the specialized gas-exchanging lung units called alveoli, where oxygen is exchanged for carbon dioxide, develop postnatally. The majority of the lung alveoli—nearly 85%—are in fact formed after birth, during the first 3 years of life. The blood supply within the capillary [...]

The lungs are the major component of the respiratory system (Figures 1A and 1B). A good way to understand the workings of the lungs is to consider their structure, or anatomy (Figure 1A). The human respiratory system begins at the nose and includes the nasal passages, which direct air to the back of the throat [...]

Asthma affects people of all ages, as mentioned in How many Americans have asthma, and a diagnosis of asthma can be made in a child as young as 2 years of age. Asthma is the most common chronic disease of childhood. Asthma is not, however, a disease limited to children. It is a myth that [...]

Asthma is very common, affecting approximately one of every ten Americans at some point in their life, according to 2001 data from the CDC’s National Health Interview Survey. It is not clear why asthma has become such a prevalent, chronic condition. One theory holds that physicians have become more adept at diagnosing asthma correctly so [...]

Yes, asthma has increased steadily in the United States through the 1980s and 1990s, as in other Westernized countries. There are more persons diagnosed with asthma now than ever before in the United States. The prevalence of asthma—that is the total number of cases of asthma in a population at any given point in time— [...]