Main content
Health and medicine
Course: Health and medicine > Unit 5
Lesson 3: Emphysema (COPD)What is emphysema?
Emphysema is a chronic medical condition (most often caused by smoking and air pollution) where lung tissue is damaged and traps air inside the lung. Learn how shortness of breath, persistent cough, and wheezing are common symptoms of this condition and why they occur in emphysema. Created by Amy Fan.
Want to join the conversation?
- How do emphysema treatments work?(4 votes)
- Well, the treatments would make it easier to breathe.(1 vote)
- Does emphysema happen in only a few of your alveoli, or all of them? How many alveolus do we have, anyways?(3 votes)
- Emphysema affects some alveoli, not all of them. We have roughly 480 million alveoli in each lung. (Source-http://www.atsjournals.org/doi/full/10.1164/rccm.200308-1107OC#.VkyKQHYrLIU)(4 votes)
- if aveoli are small enough to fit that many then how were scientists able to count them up to two and a half million(3 votes)
- Not sure but I believe if you can figure out the number of alveoli in a small volume, let's say 1 cm^3, then you can multiply by the volume of the lung (-the large airways) to get the total number of alveoli(3 votes)
- At aboutAmy said that people with Emphysema tend to get a barrel chest. However, that also seems to happen sometimes to people with asthma. 8:11(2 votes)
- from my understanding, both have smooth muscle hypertrophy. I would think it is much more pronounced in COPD as Asthma is reversible since it is more of an allergic overreaction enhanced by histamine but COPD is not, because they cannot exhale. The changes made to the mucosa in the lungs are permanent, replacing elastic tissue with fiber.(1 vote)
- How do you treat this medication or injections?(2 votes)
- The obstruction in COPD is caused by the collapse in the lower airways that are held open by 1.elastic CT (connective tissue) of the lungs and 2. transpulmonary pressure. As said in the video, that occurs during expiration what the air is exhaled it pulls the tissue with it to "close it". I would assume it is one time thing, when it closes it is closed as the air cannot get in or could you also say that it can reopen and than close again randomly episodically?
Just want to hear other opinions. Thanks!(1 vote) - I'm bit confused could someone please explain it shortly but easily? Also, if a person has a barrel chest, does that not mean that there's too much CO2 (Carbon dioxide) in that persons body? How can they live with that much co2? Could they get a surgery done to change back to normal?(1 vote)
- did you ever hear of medicinal marajauna being used as a broncodilater(1 vote)
- at 5;30 if the bronchioles are blocked then how does air enter the alveoli? Does it unblock during inhalation?(1 vote)
- I was diagnosed as Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease(COPD) carrier after tests were done to investigate my immune system. I had Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) of the Lungs already present. I started treatment with Bronchodilator which Helps open the airways of the lungs to make breathing easier and Steroid which Modifies or simulates hormone effects, often to reduce inflammation or for tissue growth and repair. After a couple of years the virus became resistant and i decided to try a more natural approach to treat the virus, so i started on Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease(COPD)Herbal formula treatment from HEALTH MED LAB CLINIC, this natural (COPD) treatment totally reversed my condition. I did another blood test after the 2 months treatment and tested negative to the virus. Go to health med lab clinic official email healthmedlab@gmail.com This treatment is a breakthrough for all (COPD) carriers.Their natural herbs are very effective and cure your (COPD) permanently.(1 vote)
- If you had emphysema, can you not breathe out but you can breathe in? Will you have trouble breathing? How does it get triggered?(1 vote)
- That's what I been wondering about. I'm pretty sure that you would have trouble breathing out but not in. Watch Emphysema pathophysiology to see how it's triggered.(1 vote)
Video transcript
Voiceover: It's such a
mouthful to say chronic obstructive pulmonary
disease, so since there's an acronym for everything
we just call this COPD. Chronic means it develops and happens over a long, long period of time. Pulmonary disease means
it happens in the lungs. But obstructive is
really the key word here, and we'll come back to
this in just a second to describe exactly
what's obstructed here. But first let's draw some airways. You have your trachea, that's
where air enters the airway. To me the whole thing looks
kind of like an upside down tree where you have these branches
that keep branching off. There's 20 or 30 branches,
I can't draw them all, but you can imagine it
just keeps getting smaller and smaller, just like
branches on a real tree. As they get to the end of a unit here, let me draw it where there's more space, we encounter something that
kind of looks like this, it's kind of like a
cluster of little bubbles. We call this the alveoli cluster. Alveoli is plural for alveolus. It's a Latin thing to make the
plural into an -i at the end. All of these are alveoli. In fact, aside from the
cluster at the end they happen around on the
stem near the end of the cluster as well, kind
of on the tree branch. To get into the nitty-gritty, this is where emphysema happens. Let's just blow up that end unit there and get a better look. You have your terminal branch here. The way I'm drawing this kind of looks like little clusters of tents. You'll see in just a second why I'm drawing it in particular like this. I'm trying to get across
the idea that there are walls separating each
alveolus from each other. The walls have alveoli and
at end you have your cluster. This is what the whole
thing looks like at the top of the breath when
it's filled with air. I'm really tempted to
compare this to a balloon that's blowing up, but we have to keep in mind that the comparison between lungs and balloons only exist during expiration. In a second we'll see what
happens during expiration but first, just to be
clear, let me explain why it's only expiration
that's like a balloon. When you have a balloon, this is your regular balloon
and you have air going in, usually there's positive
pressure out here putting air in. Either you're blowing
into it or it's hooked up to a machine or something
and that's how air gets in. But in the lungs during inspiration, nothing is blowing into your
mouth forcing the air in. The air comes in by a
negative pressure inside. The way that happens is
because our chest wall, it's kind of like a box
outside the balloon. It expands with muscles,
and as they expand it takes the walls of the balloon with it, and that negative pressure
is how air goes in. But we're really not concerned
with inspiration right now because obstructive
diseases are expiratory. Regardless of how the air got
in there we can start thinking of it exactly like a balloon
at the top of a breath now. When you let a balloon go the
air just rushes right out, it's the same thing in your lungs. As soon as you relax the walls
of this airway pushes the air out, because the
wonderful protein that we call elastin that makes up the
structure of these walls. Whoever named this really thought
it through because elastin describes the fact that it's
elastic, like a rubber band. As soon as the lungs relax
these walls snap back to their regular size, kind of like this. Not very much air inside
at all, because the recoil strength of these walls
pushes the air out. Now in COPD what happens is
this elastin gets destroyed. I just said that elastin
gives the elastic quality of the walls, so when
that's gone, the elastic quality of these partitionings
that hold their structure, that give their recoil strength,
that's all gone as well. Instead of looking like a
perky balloon animal with all these shapes, I think
of a lung that has COPD, or this same structure, same
unit of the lung that has COPD, kind of looks like this
amorphous blob because the walls have lost their structure,
they've lost their recoil strength, so they don't
hold their original shape. It's kind of floppy, kind of like a plastic bag instead of a balloon. When you have a plastic bag and you let it go air does not rush out, there's no recoil strength
making the walls snap back. It kind of just stays
here and nothing happens. That's the first step, and
to make matters worse in emphysema, what happens
is here in the stem of the airway this area actually
collapses and forms a physical obstruction
to the air coming out. The reason that happens,
I kind of like to think of it as what happens
when you have an open door in your house and
it's a windy day or breezy. As the wind goes through this open airway sometimes the door just shuts with it, and you hear this loud, it
suddenly pulls the door shut. It's kind of the same
thing, that as air is trying to get out here it
pulls the walls with it. Usually there's elastin and
structure to the walls so this remains open, but here without
all that the walls just want to go with the air,
such that it collapses here. Now you have all these air
behind it that cannot get out. Not only are the walls not pushing it out but now you have a closed door. These things combined together is what gives you obstructed disease. COPD technically refers
to two different diseases. There's emphysema, which is
what we're talking about today, with elastin destruction, and
there's chronic bronchitis. Anything -itis just means inflammation or irritation to an area,
the airway is irritated. Depending on how this person
got the disease a lot of times these two variations
of COPD can exist together in one person, but today
we're just talking about emphysema in terms of elastin destruction. Okay, so where were we. We talked about how there's all this extra air in here that cannot escape your lungs. You might think, "So
what? I work all day to "get air into my lungs,
that's the whole point," and you would be half correct. If we imagine that there's
a blood supply here, I mean the blood supply
in the airways go together because they need to
form an exchange system. Oxygen is usually in the lungs
that we pulled from the air, so oxygen goes into our
blood stream making it red. Then the other half of the deal
is that we have carbon dioxide that the blood brings to
the lung to get rid of. These are made by our tissues after they've used up the oxygen. It's kind of like a waste product. This needs to go back into the lungs and out through our mouth, and this exchange is really the complete job of our lungs. With obstructed disease
you can do half of it. You can put oxygen in but if
you can't get carbon dioxide out it's just as big of
a problem as not getting oxygen because half of our
exchange is not working. There's the root of all
the problems in emphysema. We have about 2.5 million of
these alveoli in our lungs. Let's imagine that all
of them have lost their elastin and they look like floppy bags. What would emphysema actually look like? If you have your regular lungs
that usually look like this, which I hope that your lungs
don't look like this but I'm sorry, I can't draw
any better right now. That's what they usually look like, and if they're filled all
the way up and air can't get out it reminds me of big pillow cases. Day in and day out they're over-inflated and they can't go back down. As this person has emphysema
for a long, long time - remember it's chronic -
the ribcage and the tissue out of the chest actually
changes shape because the lungs are pushing on it all the time. I don't know if you can
tell what I'm drawing at all here but what I'm
trying to draw is a barrel. People who have COPD are
often described as having a barrel chest, which
means they're almost as far from front to back as they
are from left to right. With this shape changing
this person is very uncomfortable to have to
carry around such a huge, round chest and have air
not being able to get out. I need to give him some hair. I feel like that's the only way my stick people can look like real people. He's unhappy because his chest is like a barrel sitting there,
he can't deflate it. There's a special way that people with emphysema often breath
that have earned them the infamous nickname
of being a pink puffer. There are two things that this
name is trying to describe. Pink is because they don't lack oxygen, so pink instead of blue. Remember I said that the
oxygen getting into the lungs is not a problem, our
problem is in exhaling. They're pink because they don't really lack oxygen in their blood. Puffers describes the fact
that they have pursed lips. Pursed lips, kind of like if
you imagine putting your mouth around a straw, and they breathe
through this smaller opening. The reason for this goes back
to this mechanical obstruction we talked about earlier
with the door slamming shut. Let's draw the door again. It's like this. Usually when we breathe
out it's like the door is hinged on something,
it's not going to close. The air rushing out, it's pretty fast, there's a lot of air because
the walls are pushing it out. Imagine this is the amount
of air that goes through. In emphysema with the door
unhinged and just flopping around in the wind it is less likely
to snap closed like that if there's less air going
through and it's going slower. That's why people have figured
out that when you have COPD if you purse your lips and you
breath slower it keeps this airway open for just a little
longer, and every second you can keep that door open
is a tiny bit more air out. Let's just put that down in writing here. We have the pursed lips,
that's the first thing. Now we have this slowing down
of the speed of the air going through, because the pursed
lips are trying to control it. But the rate of their
breathing actually goes up, just because since they're
breathing not so efficiently they compensate by breathing
more times per minute. This also contributes to
the fact that they look like they're puffing and
huffing to other people. In a nutshell if I were
to describe what I think of emphysema as being in
my head it would be these dilated lungs, a big barrel
chest, and this person breathing with pursed
lips and they're puffing.