Navigating a diagnosis of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) is a lot like driving one of those narrow West Virginia backroads with blind curves and no guardrails. The kind of road where you ease off the gas without being told, because you’ve lived long enough to know that what…
Discussion
When I was in elementary school, I told my parents that something was crawling on me at night. They exchanged the kind of knowing look adults give when they think a child is expressing emotion instead of sensation. They suspected school stress or a plea to sleep between them. But…
Discussion
People with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) may know what to do in a breathing crisis, but that doesn’t always mean we will do the correct thing. When I was diagnosed, I knew that when my portable concentrator beeped to tell me I was running short on battery…
Discussion
This Easter, I found myself at home with nothing special planned. No ham in the oven, no table set, no small ritual to mark the day. Just a quiet house and a long afternoon. And somewhere in that stillness, I realized I’d let chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) shrink…
Discussion
I was on one of my “let’s see where this road goes” adventures, the kind with those blind curves you don’t see until you’re already in them, when I noticed something unsettling. My portable oxygen concentrator (POC) wasn’t giving me oxygen with every breath. It wasn’t a dramatic failure, just…
The experimental therapy tozorakimab from AstraZeneca was superior to a placebo at reducing the rate of moderate to severe exacerbations, or sudden episodes of symptom worsening, in adults with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). That’s according to top-line, one-year data from two Phase 3 clinical trials —…
COPD is a chronic inflammatory disease of the lungs, in which the airways become blocked, causing cough with mucus, wheezing, and shortness of breath.
The causes of COPD are not fully understood. However, long-term exposure to lung irritants is known to damage the lungs and the airways.
Some people may also experience exacerbations, or episodes of sudden disease worsening, that may persist for several days.
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