Here are some of the symptoms that may indicate you have COPD:

• A cough that won’t go away
• Coughing up a lot of sputum (mucous)
• Shortness of breath

How Cigarettes Cause COPD

COPD is caused by chronic inflammation (irritation) of the lungs. As you puff on your cigarette, harmful toxins from the smoke enter your lungs and stick to its lining. In response to these toxins, your lungs release chemicals that destroy the dangerous toxins. Unfortunately, these chemicals also destroy healthy lung tissue. Every time you smoke a cigarette, the cycle of lung inflammation and destruction is repeated.

One of the main problems with diagnosing COPD is that it takes many years before it shows up. In fact, it’s not uncommon for a person to smoke a pack a day for 20 years before developing the symptoms of COPD (chronic cough, increased sputum production, and/or shortness of breath).

The good news is that spirometry testing allows you to catch the disease early on, before you start to develop severe symptoms. Getting a spirometry test is simple and it involves breathing as hard as you can into an apparatus that measures your air flow. If your airflow is too low, you might have COPD.

Treating COPD

Treating COPD will:

• Prevent worsening of the disease
• Relieve chronic coughing and shortness of breath
• Prevent and treat complications (bronchitis, pneumonia, heart failure)
• Reduce deaths due to COPD

Treatment is based on how severe the COPD is. Medications include bronchodilators (medications that open up the airways), steroids (medications that reduce lung inflammation), antibiotics (used to treat lung infections that commonly occur due to COPD), oxygen therapy, and mucolytic agents (thin out the excess sputum produced). Cough medicines are avoided since the persistent cough of COPD is what helps clear out the lungs and prevents infections.

Medical Tip: People with COPD are more prone to lung infections. Getting a yearly flu shot as well as a pneumonia vaccine every seven years are important preventive measures to keep you healthy.

Another treatment for COPD is lung rehabilitation. A good lung rehab program involves exercise training, nutritional counseling, and education about COPD. Lung rehabilitation can reduce symptoms, improve quality of life, and increase ability to perform physical activities. Call your local hospital to see if they offer a lung rehabilitation program.

The following chart summarizes the basic treatments of COPD depending upon the severity:

Quitting Smoking

By far, the most important thing you can do to treat COPD is to quit smoking. By quitting smoking you will:

• decrease the inflammation of your lungs
• decrease the amount of sputum you produce
• breathe easier and cough less
• get fewer lung infections
• be able to perform more physical activities

To really boost your chances of successful quitting, we have developed "Put It Out". But if you are not quite ready to quit yet, check out "Thinking About Quitting" where you will find practical tips for getting started.

Many people with COPD feel that it’s too late, that the damage has been done and that taking medications and quitting smoking won’t make any difference. But we can show you just exactly how much of a difference quitting can make, no matter how severe the COPD is.

Is It Ever Too Late?

If you already have developed COPD, quitting is still the best thing to do, no matter how mild or severe your condition is. This is shown in the graph below (understanding the graph takes a while).

The left side of the graph represents your ability to breathe. As people get older, there is a normal decline a person’s ability to breathe, as indicated by the blue line. If a person who has COPD continues to smoke, the decline in breathing occurs much more quickly, as indicated by the yellow line.

If you follow the yellow line, you can see that for the person who has COPD and continues to smoke, they will become disabled by age 65 and die much earlier than the person who never smokes.

The most important part of the graph is demonstrated by the dotted and grey lines. These lines represent the people who have COPD and quit smoking. For the people with mild COPD, quitting helped them live a lot longer and they had better airflow than the people who never quit. For the people with severe COPD, they were able to breathe better and live longer than the people didn’t quit smoking. The bottom line is that quitting smoking is good for you at any age, no matter how severe your COPD is.

Since quitting is the best thing to do to avoid or treat COPD, it only makes sense to make your odds of quitting as high as possible. That’s what "Put It Out" is for. Our program will help you break the habit part of why you smoke and teach you how to handles stress without smoking. There is a lot more to "Put It Out", and we suggest you listen to some of the segments to get a better idea of what the program can do for you.