Types of COPD

[Lakeland]

I want to share this link respiratorytherapycave.blog... I will leave you make your own minds up what to think

[katieoxo60]

Hi Lakeland, looked at your link read a bit about COPD but no time to search all topics but it looks an intriguing site thank you for sharing the link

[droo32]

What the blog's author really mean is "two types of smokers".

However this is not entirely accurate either. In reality the susceptibility towards COPD, like most things in life is not categorical, but a continuum. Some people never smoke but are exposed to airborne pollutants or their lungs don't develop fully during childhood and as a result end up with COPD. Others smoke for only a brief period of time in their teens or early twenties and develop precocious COPD. Some other people smoke for 40 or 50 years into their sixties until they are finally diagnosed with moderate COPD. And the majority of smokers, roughly 60 percent, are capable of smoking into their 70's without ever receiving a COPD diagnosis - not to say that they won't develop some other smoking related disease beforehand. Scientists aren't sure why some never smokers get COPD, about 15 percent by the age of 75, and why most lifelong smokers don't get COPD but they believe their are many factors involved such as genetics, nutrition, poverty, etc. In general however, lung function can be negatively correlated with the duration and quantity of smoking at a population based level, meaning that if one was to sample an entire population of their smoking habits, those who smoke the most will have the worst lung function. This is why smoking is the leading risk factor for COPD however there are many outliers as COPD is a very heterogeneous disease and hence the reason why developing new effective therapies has been so challenging. The Peto-Fletcher study of male British postal workers only endured 8 years of follow-up and at best their curve of the natural history of COPD was a hypothesis of how they believed the disease to progress. More recent and accurate studies have shown that their model was not accurate and in fact the most rapid decline in lung function occurs early in the disease (stages I and II) and then the decline slows down as it progresses towards stage IV where the annual FEV1 loss is comparable to that expected in the natural physiological decline.

Not to knock on the blog that you referenced but much of the information presented is dated and inaccurate to be written by someone who supposedly works in pulmonary medicine as I assume the author does. If you have the interest and time and want to really be impressed with state of the art advances in the science of chronic obstructive lung disease you should watch some of the following videos. These are all presented by world renown chest physicians - two of them Dr. Peter Barnes and Dr. Don Sin are indisputably the world's top researchers in COPD.

For the laymen:

youtube.com/playlist?list=P...

For the real science:

youtube.com/playlist?list=P...

hstalks.com/main/browse_tal...

[Hidden in reply to droo32]

For the laymen/women video defines COPD with smoking activity the slide beside the speaker says smokers disease the same as Lakeland blog. With general agreement on COPD covering a wide number of conditions the doctors are still calling the majority smoking related as they under report death by lung disease sparing families the stigma of smoking.

Ali