Other aspects
COPD – Asthma and smoking (1/2016)
Asthma is very often a disease that is passed on by the parents. Frequently it already starts in the childhood, at the time when most people did not yet smoke one cigarette.
Indeed, smoking is not a cause of asthma. Nor does smoking later on cause asthma.
However, when people suffer from asthma smoking actively may cause negative effects. Asthma is characterized by an inflammation of the mucoid skin. In many smoking asthmatics smoking leads to additional damage and to additional inflammation of the mucoid skin. Effects are adding up. If we treat the inflammation and the asthmatic goes on smoking we can compare this to a man calling the fire brigade to his burning house while pouring oil on the fire by himself.
Apparently one can find few asthmatics, who are badly harmed by smoking. Individual people suffering from asthma who smoke are able to breathe more easily after smoking. Some asthmatics even report after quitting smoking they felt more breathless.
Chronic bronchitis is often caused by genetic transmission as well. Smoking at the time of birth does not occur. Smoking itself and alone does not cause chronic bronchitis or COPD. Who inherits the condition by his parents develops chronic bronchitis 1 to 20 years earlier than without smoking. Prediction for individual cases is difficult but looking back we can judge it.
For example: If somebody with the inherited condition starts suffering from chronic bronchitis aged around 70 years, he hardly could have developed it a hundred years ago. At that time only a few people suffered from this disease. Today many people live up to 90 years. So consequently they suffer from this illness in their last twenty years (Cough and shortness of breath). If these people additionally smoke and they start the disease twenty years earlier, so they suffer for the last forty years out of 90 years. This means that nowadays they suffer nearly half of their lives and even during their working life and when doing active sports or so on and not few of them retire earlier because of breathlessness. This means an important loss of quality of life. That is why not smoking is so important. Not smoking means quality of life in the second half of life. Smoking causes a loss of quality of life!
If you want to quit smoking write on a paper: “I shall be free from cigarettes and I want to save my quality of life or even improve it.” Write the sentence twenty times on paper and put it up in the toilette, in the kitchen, in your office, over your bed, in your car or anywhere. You want to quit it. You want more quality of life and you can get it!
COPD – Asthma and sports (2/2017)
Asthma is a disease of the mucoid layer in the airways, which is inflamed. The inflammation causes production of phlegm, cough, susceptibility of infections of the airways and highly irritable bronchi. Breathlessness is only the second stage, caused by the inflammation. Often shortness of breath is experienced first under exertion, under exertion under special circumstances, sometimes when sleeping during the night.
That is why some people speak of „exertional asthma“ even if this term is not quite correct.
Chronic bronchitis is a disease of the mucoid layer in the airways as well as of the tissue of the lung. In many cases shortness of breath is experienced first under severe exertion and later on even under light exertion.
Again and again I see patients who do sports in order to train their lungs among other aims. Not few smokers think that the negative effects of smoking on the lung could be reduced by physical training.
The lung – the big muscle.
Again I am often told by patients that they had been shorter of breath when they were physically untrained. Shortness of breath seems to be relieved by physical training. That is why physical training has to be good for the lung.
Yet, what is true about these opinions and claims?
The lung is spread in the thorax within a certain volume. This volume remains the same whether we often train or whether we only sit in front of the tv. Competitive athletes do not have a thorax double the size of average. More function do we not achieve by growing of the thorax (like in muscles) but by breathing deeper and faster. The lung is filled and emptied passively. Training hardly alters the lung, nor is the chemical structure altered.
Exertion does not widen the bronchi. In many cases exertion is not the cause for constricted bronchis when shortness of breath is experienced. Decisive are the irritants in the air which are ventilated by doing sports (clammy air outside in opposite to warm and dry air inside etc.). The irritants decide how far the constriction of the bronchi is experienced.
It is possible to train of the skeletal muscles, of the muscles at arms and legs, of body and neck and the muscles of the diaphragma and the muscles of the thorax to help breathing too. That is why many well trained people suffering from lung diseases feel better than untrained ones. But the inflammation itself of the mucoid layer has not subsided in consequnce, nor the irritability or the width of the bronchi. The diaphragmas and the muscles of the thorax, which help breathing are outside the lung, not inside. However, we didn’t change anything inside the lung by training, only outside the lung at the muscles.