As one of the primary lung disorders that’s diagnosed under the umbrella medical term of “chronic obstructive pulmonary disease” (COPD), emphysema injury and inflammation cause ongoing, worsening airflow blockage and ongoing respiratory problems.
Given that emphysema can inflict irreparable damage on your airways and lungs for many years before it starts causing symptoms, knowing the risk factors that make this damage more likely can be invaluable for protecting your health — especially if you’re a smoker.
Here, our seasoned team of board-certified pulmonologists at Fivestar Pulmonary Associates in Allen, McKinney, and Plano, Texas, discusses how emphysema affects your lungs, explores the various risk factors that make you more likely to develop it, and explains why early medical intervention is always best.
When your lungs and airways are frequently exposed to cigarette smoke, chemical irritants, or air pollution, they’re more likely to sustain permanent, function-impairing damage that makes it harder for you to breathe. Often, this damage takes the form of a progressive and irreversible condition called emphysema.
To understand how emphysema makes it harder for you to breathe, it’s helpful to know a bit about the respiration process. When you draw oxygen into your nose, it travels down your airway, through your bronchial tubes (bronchiole) deep inside your lungs, and into the tiny air sacs (alveoli) arranged in clusters at the end of each bronchial tube.
When oxygen enters these thin-walled, fragile air sacs, the alveoli stretch to draw in as much oxygen as possible, which they then transfer to your blood. As you exhale, your alveoli contract and force carbon dioxide out of your body.
An average set of lungs contains about 300 million alveoli. When something — most often, harmful cigarette chemicals and smoke — damages the walls of these delicate air sacs, they can’t bounce back. The resulting condition is known as emphysema.
Emphysema makes the walls of alveoli weak and floppy, significantly reducing the amount of oxygen and carbon dioxide they can exchange in your lungs. This means less oxygen moves into your bloodstream when you breathe, and less carbon dioxide moves out. Common signs of emphysema include:
As the disease progresses, it can fully destroy the sensitive air sac walls, further impairing your respiratory function. Emphysema can also cause a pulmonary blockage that traps air in your lungs and inflates your chest, making it appear fuller.
Emphysema causes and risk factors are inseparable, meaning they’re one and the same. In most cases, the disease is a result of long-term exposure to airway-damaging irritants. In the United States, cigarette smoke is both the most common cause of emphysema and its most significant risk factor.
People with the highest risk of developing emphysema include those who have:
As mentioned, smoking is the number-one cause of emphysema, as well as its top risk factor. Up to three in four people (75%) with this progressive lung disease are current or former smokers.
While most people only associate cigarettes with emphysema, any smoking habit is risky — including smoking cigars or pipes, vaping, and even smoking “natural” marijuana.
The second leading emphysema cause and risk factor is long-term exposure to lung irritants, such as secondhand smoke, smoke from a coal or wood-burning stove, air pollution (indoor or outdoor), and chemical fumes or dust on the job.
People who carry a higher-than-average emphysema risk include those who have:
Having underdeveloped lungs or a history of asthma or chronic respiratory infections can increase your risk of developing emphysema as you age.
Less commonly, emphysema is the result of a rare genetic disorder called Alpha-1 antitrypsin (AAt) deficiency. Made in your liver and secreted into your bloodstream, AAt is a protein that helps protect your lungs.
If smoking is the primary emphysema risk factor, then the most significant secondary risk factor is age. Why? Because this progressive lung disease takes root quietly, and its effects only begin to emerge over time.
Although emphysema can be diagnosed in people who are as young as 40 years old, it appears most often in people between the ages of 50-70.
This is important to keep in mind if you’re at high risk of developing emphysema since early intervention offers you the best chance for controlling symptoms, minimizing lung damage, and slowing disease progression.
The longer emphysema goes untreated, the more harm it can cause to your lungs — and the more it can undermine your health and vitality. Luckily, we can catch emphysema in its early, most treatable stage with our comprehensive COPD assessment test.
Whether you’re worried about your emphysema risk factors or you’re already experiencing unexplained shortness of breath, we can help. Call or click online to schedule an appointment at your nearest Fivestar Pulmonary Associates office today.
