Living with COPD can cause other health problems, especially ones that impact your lungs. Lung complications can then trigger more symptoms and can worsen your COPD.
How COPD Affects Your Lungs
As you breathe, air makes its way down your windpipe and into your lungs using two airways (bronchi). Once inside your lungs, these airways branch off into many smaller ones (bronchioles), and at each end is a cluster of tiny air sacs (alveoli).
When your lungs are healthy, these air sacs and airways are stretchy, helping to bring air in and out of your lungs. But with COPD, they become more rigid. The illness also damages the walls between many of the air sacs and causes them to become inflamed. Your airways then become clogged with too much mucus.
Lung Problems From COPD
COPD makes your lungs weaker and makes it harder for your body to fight off certain illnesses. Here’s a closer look at some of the lung problems that can happen with COPD.
Respiratory infections
When you have COPD, your odds of catching a cold, the flu, and pneumonia rise. These respiratory infections worsen COPD by making it harder to breathe and damaging lung tissue even more.
Experts suggest people with COPD get a flu vaccine every year. You may also want to think about getting vaccinated against pneumococcal disease, including pneumonia. There are two kinds of vaccines:
- Pneumococcal conjugate vaccines (PCVs, specifically PCV15 and PCV20)
- Pneumococcal polysaccharide vaccine (PPSV23)
People with COPD should get both vaccines to protect against pneumonia.
Lung cancer
If you smoke and have COPD, you have a higher chance of getting lung cancer than a smoker without COPD. Research shows lung cancer and COPD may have the same underlying causes, like genetics and problems with cell energy.
Your body can usually handle the harm from smoking and COPD with defense systems like antioxidants and DNA repair. But these defenses fail in both lung cancer and COPD. It’s also possible that COPD plays a role in lung cancer by causing extra stress on cells, leading to DNA damage, exposure to inflammation, and other factors.
The symptoms of lung cancer and COPD can look similar and include:
- A lingering cough that may gradually get worse
- Trouble breathing or taking a full breath
- Chest pain
- Wheezing
Surgery, radiofrequency ablation, radiation therapy, chemotherapy, targeted drug therapy, and immunotherapy are all treatments for lung cancer. Your doctor will take into account the type of lung cancer you have, where it is, and if the cancer has spread before deciding on a treatment plan.
High blood pressure in the arteries of the lungs
COPD gradually damages small air sacs and connected blood vessels inside your lungs. It also narrows the arteries that carry blood from your heart to your lungs (pulmonary arteries). This causes the blood pressure in these arteries to spike too high, a condition called pulmonary hypertension.
With this condition, you’ll probably feel short of breath. You may also feel lightheaded or more tired than usual, even during activities like mild exercise. Other symptoms include:
- Coughing (though coughing up blood is rare)
- Wheezing
- Swelling, especially of the legs (edema) due to right-sided heart failure
- Voice hoarseness
Treating the root cause of pulmonary hypertension can ease symptoms. You could also need drugs that widen (dilate) your blood vessels and allow better blood flow through your lungs, as well as extra oxygen.
Collapsed lungs
Also called pneumothorax, this condition happens when air escapes into the space between your lung and chest wall. The air then collapses your lung by putting pressure on the outside of it. Your lung may totally or partially collapse. Damage from lung diseases like COPD weakens lung tissue, raising your chances of a collapsed lung.
Signs of the condition include abrupt pain in your chest and trouble taking a full breath. If you have these symptoms, see a doctor right away. Treatment for a collapsed lung involves removing the extra air in your chest with a needle or chest tube inserted between your ribs.
A buildup of carbon dioxide
When you breathe out, your lungs usually get rid of carbon dioxide. But with COPD, it builds up in your bloodstream. This causes your blood to become acidic, called respiratory acidosis.
Left untreated, the condition causes headaches and drowsiness. Then, you may lapse into a coma and possibly die. Treatments for respiratory acidosis focus on strengthening your lungs and opening your airways. A bronchodilator such as albuterol can help, while those with serious symptoms may need to use a breathing machine (ventilator).
Lung failure
Lung failure (respiratory failure) happens when your blood oxygen levels drop too low or carbon dioxide is too high. You could form this life-threatening condition during a COPD flare-up (exacerbation).
Symptoms are shortness of breath, sleepiness, and confusion. If you’re dark-skinned, the skin around your mouth, eyes, and under your nails could turn a gray or whitish color, while light-skinned people may notice a bluish tint to their skin.
Treatments for lung failure include extra oxygen, a breathing machine, and treating other causes of the condition like pneumonia.
Show Sources
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SOURCES:
Mayo Clinic: “COPD,” “Pneumothorax.”
National Institutes of Health: “COPD.”
Merck Manual: “Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD),” “Acidosis,” “Respiratory Failure,” “Pulmonary Hypertension.”
Lung Cancer: “The relationship between COPD and lung cancer.”
CDC: “Pneumococcal Vaccination.”
MedlinePlus: “COPD.”
