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Comparing Asthma And COPD

Decent Essays

Health Technologies and Respiratory Disease Patient Empowerment

Serious respiratory diseases such as Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD), including chronic bronchitis and emphysema, are a leading cause of morbidity and death worldwide. Asthma, a chronic disease that involves inflammation of the airways, bronchoconstriction, and intermittent (usually reversible) airflow obstruction, also affects numerous individuals worldwide. Both COPD and asthma are common obstructive lung disorders that affect over 49 million people in the US (1). While the pathology of asthma and COPD are distinct, both diseases share some features. Asthma is often a childhood disease, but some patients manifest symptoms or develop the disease as adults. …show more content…

COPD, however, is an adult disease whose leading cause is long-term cigarette smoking. Airway inflammation with lymphocytes, neutrophils, and macrophages is common in COPD (2), and remodeling of airways commonly occurs. While airway obstruction in asthma is usually reversible, there can be a fixed obstructive component, and in COPD, where there is usually a significant fixed obstructive component, there can be partial reversibility in airway obstruction (2). There are patients who present with an overlap syndrome with mixed features of COPD/asthma (2). COPD is also potentially preventable, if one avoids cigarette smoking, which often times is the primary cause. The most common recognized forms of COPD are chronic bronchitis, seen as bouts of coughing and severe …show more content…

The shorter acting bronchodilators (i.e., β2-agonists for asthma and COPD, anticholinergic for COPD) are used in emergency situations in order to provide immediate relief (6). Technologies will play an ever increasing role in monitoring compliance with these agents - and more importantly - finding strategies to promote therapeutic successes with respect to the use of prescribed medications for individual patients. Monitoring technologies can be invaluable in this instance, since patients do not always adhere to their prescribed asthma and COPD medication plans, with non-adherence estimates ranging between 30 % and 70 % (7). Because of this, it can be difficult to distinguish patients with severe, medication-insensitive disease from those who do not take medicines

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