Lets start by saying as the first emphysema fact that emphysema is
best avoided in the first place, it is an acute lung disease with
damage that is permanent. It shortens your breath thereby limiting your
activity. It goes without saying that sufferers want and wish they had
made choices to avoid emphysema in the first place. It was hard for me
to admit, as a smoker, that by smoking it was having a degenerative
effect on my health. After all, all I was doing was having a cigarette
because it felt good and I felt like having one. Thankfully I have
managed to successfully quit smoking on the 23rd of February 2006. For
me and for most people it was hard to imagine what damage I was doing
to my health by smoking. Emphysema is a serious disease that can be
avoided.
To fill you in further here are some Emphysema facts.
Inside your lungs are small sacks called alveoli and the small
tubes that lead to these sacks are bronchioles - when you have
emphysema these tubes and sacks necessary for breathing become blocked
or they lose elasticity and loose the ability to contract and not allow
all of the air in your lungs to expel so your next breath in is smaller
because your lungs are already nearly full. Thereby reducing your lungs
ability to move oxygen from your lungs into your blood stream, slowing
your body's function, slowing down the sufferer who with limited lung
capacity more quickly runs out of breath. Quitting smoking is the most
important step in avoiding emphysema. Because emphysema is a gradual
disease the degenerative effects are slow to be noticeable in other
words if you are a smoker - this one can creep up on you.
With emphysema the prevention is far better than the cure. The
cures for emphysema can be as dramatic as lung transplanting, but more
common treatments are antibiotics and exercise to increase lung
capacity - but by far the most important step is to quit smoking.