Emphysema Prognosis

Emphysema is a progressive disease that affects the lungs, which leads to shortness of breath. Emphysema comes under the umbrella of chronic obstructive pulmonary diseases. In emphysema, the lung tissue is progressively destroyed, due to which not only does the parenchymatous tissue get injured and stop functioning properly, but there is destruction of the airway passages as well, as is seen in the bronchioles. This leads to difficulty in breathing, expanded chest, shortness of breath and other such breathing problems. This is the reason why emphysema is included in the spectrum of chronic obstructive pulmonary diseases, because it causes obstruction of the air passages, which leads to insufficient amount of air reaching the lung tissue.

Furthermore, emphysema symptoms get aggravated as there is insufficient amount of air exchange that takes place across the alveolar epithelium, which causes hypoxia in the cells of the body, due to deficiency of oxygen and build up of carbon dioxide. However, the worst part of this disease is that the damage that is caused to the lung is irreversible as there is no way of repairing the damaged alveolar tissue. This is the reason why emphysema prognosis is relatively bleak when compared to other lung diseases. However, prognosis for emphysema will depend on many factors, like there are many emphysema stages which will greatly affect the prognosis. Given below are a few more factors that will affect the prognosis for emphysema.

Factors Affecting Emphysema Prognosis

Smoking
One of the main factors affecting the emphysema prognosis is smoking. In almost all cases of emphysema that are reported, the person has a history of smoking. Smoking causes irreversible lung damage. This happens because when toxins such as cigarette smoke are breathed in, the harmful particles get trapped in the alveoli of lungs, which leads to a localized inflammatory reaction. This often eventually leads to disintegration of the alveolar septum. Furthermore, when there is deficiency of an agent called alpha 1-antitrypsin, the person has a higher chance of developing emphysema at an early stage, and this probability is only compounded if the person is a chronic smoker. Thus, although there is no way of reversing the smoking effects that have already led to considerable damage of lungs, if the person does immediately stop smoking completely, then the progression of the disease can be stalled. However, if the person continues to smoke in an ignorant manner, especially when the disease has reached its end stage, emphysema life expectancy is very poor indeed.

Diet and Lifestyle
There are certain lifestyle changes that a person can make so as to prevent the chances of progression of this disease. Firstly, there are certain breathing exercises for copd that a person can practice at home to increase his tidal volume, which can help bring back the lungs to normal functioning. Having a healthy diet and regularly exercising and keeping one's body active also greatly betters mild emphysema prognosis. However, for advanced emphysema prognosis to better, the person will need to not only try out breathing techniques that will improve the lung capacity, but will also probably need oxygen therapy along with certain other bronchodilators, antibiotics, etc.

There are certain other factors also that affect emphysema life expectancy, like age of the patient, his immunity, presence of any other lung infections, surrounding environmental factors, etc. It might scare people to know that two people die of emphysema every hour in the United States, and thus, emphysema prognosis does seem bleak, as the mortality rate of this progressively degenerating disease speaks for itself. However, unless the disease is very severe, prognosis can be said to be a bit better, provided the person makes certain drastic changes in his lifestyle, by stopping smoking and regularly exercising.