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Scientists say the effects of cannabis on lung health has been difficult to isolate, as users frequently smoke tobacco as well.

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is a condition in which your airways narrow and swell and may produce extra mucus.

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the pulmonary effects of cocaine could be acute or chronic.

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your lungs is filled with water.

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it is bad for our lungs.

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not drinking enough water can dry our lungs.

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Corona Virus Causes Pneumonia.

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A man in China burst a lung after running for more than two miles in the coronavirus epicenter city of Wuhan while wearing a face mask, according to a report.

The 26-year-old jogger was rushed to Wuhan Central Hospital, where he underwent major surgery for the collapsed lung after he began having difficulty breathing, the UK's Sun reported.

Doctors discovered that the man's left lung had compressed by 90 percent, moving his heart to the right side of his body.

A collapsed lung is known as a pneumothorax, which occurs when air leaks into the space between the lung and the chest wall, causing shortness of breath and potentially fatal complications.

Health officials believe the man's lung burst because he was wearing a mask while running.

Chen Baojun, head of thoracic surgery at the hospital, said the man was already susceptible to a spontaneous pneumothorax because of his tall and lanky frame.

In two other incidents involving physical activity, two Chinese boys dropped dead within a week of one another recently while wearing masks during gym class.

The 14-year-olds were each running laps for a physical examination when they suddenly collapsed on the track. The death certificate of one boy listed the cause as sudden cardiac arrest.

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Wuhan man suffers collapsed lung while running with face mask

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A man in China burst a lung after running for more than two miles in the coronavirus epicenter city of Wuhan while wearing a face mask, according to a report. The 26-year-old jogger was rushed to Wuhan Central Hospital, where he underwent major surgery for the collapsed lung after he began having difficulty breathing, the UK's Sun reported.

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Maharashtra: Two kids playing inside car get locked in, die of suffocation | Navi Mumbai News - Times of India

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Siblings Sohail (5) and Abbas Khan (3), living in the Nangalwadi chawl of Mahad MIDC area, died of suffocation in a parked Honda City after they accid

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For the more than seven million people in California's Bay Area living through historic wildfires, it's been hard to breathe for the past month. For 29 days the region has been under a " Spare the Air" alert, which means inhaling outdoor air presents a health hazard. Air quality is even worse in Oregon and Washington, and by this morning smoke had stretched all the way to the East Coast and even to Europe.

Wildfire smoke contains a variety of gases and particles from the materials that fuel the fire, including ozone, carbon monoxide, polycyclic aromatic compounds, nitrogen dioxide, and particulate matter-pollutants linked to respiratory and cardiovascular illnesses, according to a study in the Journal of the American Heart Association.

When a healthy person breathes in air tinged with smoke from the fires, they may feel a sting in their eyes, and when they cough, they may have trouble recovering their breath. But what happens to that same individual when they breathe smoky air for extended periods every year is still unclear.

"People were once exposed once or twice in a lifetime," says Keith Bein, an atmospheric scientist at the University of California, Davis. "Now it's happening every summer and for longer."

In the United States, air quality is measured on a color-coded scale known as the Air Quality Index (AQI), which was established in 1977 as part of the Clean Air Act. Stretching from 0 to 500, the AQI is split across six categories-from good to hazardous. Its scale measures the levels of five major pollutants: ground-level ozone, carbon monoxide, sulfur dioxide, nitrogen dioxide, and particulate matter.

State and local agencies in cities with populations over 350,000 are required to report these levels daily. The pollutants are measured both by instruments on the ground and satellites that constantly collect information about what's in the atmosphere-including the particles from wildfires.

Impact on the human body

"We know pretty well it causes eye irritation, cough, wheezing-people with asthma are more likely to have an episode," says Irva Hertz-Picciotto, director of Environmental Health Sciences Core Center at the University of California, Davis.

"Wildfire smoke is a very complex type of air pollution," says Sarah Henderson, an environmental health scientist at the University of British Columbia. "It has many different gases in it, and the composition of those small particles can be highly variable, depending on what's burning [and] how hot it's burning."

Of particular concern, she says, is particulate matter 2.5 microns in diameter-also referred to as PM 2.5. Those small particles, and ones even smaller, are capable of penetrating deep into a person's lungs. Henderson says the body responds by releasing the same immune cells it would deploy to attack a virus. Unlike a virus, however, particulate matter isn't broken down by that immune response and results in long-lasting inflammation.

"That inflammation affects your lungs, kidneys, liver, and probably your brain," says Henderson.

Wildfires are a growing health threat -15 of California's 20 worst fires have occurred in the past 20 years, and Henderson says more evidence is needed to show exactly how wildfire smoke affects organs after long-term exposure.

"We don't have a clear understanding of what the health effects are on an unborn fetus, but systemic inflammation in a woman who is pregnant may affect her unborn baby," adds Henderson.

When wildfire smoke enters the airway, the tiny particles that it contains-which are about 30 times smaller than a human hair -can get lodged deep in the lungs and injure the lining. The body kicks into gear to dispel the foreign invaders, triggering spontaneous reflexes like coughing that helps cilia, the little hairs lining the cells of the airway, beat the particles out.

But the immune cells can't break down the particulate matter-which only makes them work harder to try to defeat it, resulting in even more inflammation, says Stephanie Christenson, assistant professor of pulmonology at University of California, San Francisco.

Inflammation can be a good thing for fighting off invaders. But Christenson says it's especially dangerous for anyone with underlying conditions such as asthma or COPD, both characterized by inflammation. Additional inflammation can exacerbate those diseases. "It's a really delicate balance before you can go overboard," she says.

With those diseases, it can be harder to get much-needed oxygen to the rest of the body. As oxygen enters the lungs it heads to the alveoli-tiny air sacs that form a thin barrier between the air and blood -and passes into the blood in the capillaries. When the body is fighting off a threat, those air sacs can fill up with mucus so that air cannot pass through, Christenson says. This also makes it more difficult for the body to eliminate the carbon dioxide, which can also cause respiratory distress.

There's some evidence that the particles themselves can break through that barrier in the capillaries, getting into the bloodstream and causing an inflammatory response throughout the body.

While respiratory problems may be the most overt response to smoke inhalation, others are less obvious. In 2018, a study in the Journal of the American Heart Association found that smoke from the 2015 wildfires that scorched more than 893,000 acres of California was associated with cardiovascular issues and problems with blood flow to the brain in 361,087 emergency department visits between May 1 and September 30.

Karol Watson, professor of medicine/cardiology at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, links that to the proximity of the heart and coronary arteries to the lungs. Watson was part of a team that conducted a 2016 study published in The Lancet that looked at the effects of a variety of pollutants in six U.S. cities and discovered a link between high levels of air pollution and coronary disease.

Underlying conditions again are particularly worrisome when it comes to the damage wildfire smoke can inflict on the heart, Watson says. Heart attacks happen when the plaque building up in the arteries ruptures, and while Watson says researchers don't believe the particulate matter causes this buildup, it can destabilize existing plaque, causing it to rupture.

There's also some evidence that air pollution can trigger irregular heart rhythms, Watson says, although there's less known about why this might happen. It's especially difficult to study air pollution, she says, noting that her team's 2016 study required them to place monitors in households across the U.S.

"The trauma people go through may also affect their immune systems," says Hertz-Picciotto. "When you're driving with flames on both sides of your car, and your tires are melting and you're not sure you're going to make it out-definitely when you lose your entire home-the stress of rebuilding...I can see that playing a role in the massive amounts of stress on top of COVID."

Potential to worsen COVID-19

According to the Centers for Disease Control, exposure to wildfire smoke can prevent a person from fighting off respiratory diseases like COVID-19.

"Higher air pollution is associated with respiratory effects and people being more prone to having respiratory illnesses," says Hertz-Picciotto. "To the extent that the immune system is compromised and cannot fight off viruses, air pollution exacerbates that."

One study recently published in the journal Environmental International found exposure to wildfire smoke in the summer correlated with three to five times more flu cases later in the year.

Tarik Benmarhia, an environmental health scientist from the University of California, San Diego, notes that the same populations of people who were more vulnerable to COVID-19-those with low incomes, pre existing conditions, and poor access to health care-may also be vulnerable to the impacts of wildfires.

A 2017 study in the American Journal of Epidemiology found that elderly Black people who are more likely to live in urban areas, where there is persistent air pollution, were more likely to be hospitalized from exposure to wildfire smoke.

Emerging threats in the suburbs

In addition to the health impacts, discovering exactly what people are breathing in is also an emerging concern among scientists.

Wildfire smoke was once primarily made of the earthy remains of fallen twigs, brush, and trees, but as wildfires increasingly blaze through suburbs, they're burning up the synthetic paints, carpets, and consumer goods that fill homes. In California's historic 2018 fires, 19,000 homes burned, compared to this year's 4,000 so far.

Bein says samples of wildfire smoke over the past five years show that for as many compounds in the smoke they can identify, there are even more that they can't.

"I don't think we've had resolution on the exposure side to see what all those chemicals are and what happens when they combust at very high temperatures," says Hertz-Picciotto, "nor do we understand how those health impacts might differ."

How to protect yourself

The CDC recommends staying indoors to avoid wildfire smoke.

HVAC systems can help purify air inside a home, as can air purifiers for a single room.

"If you have a room you can keep cool, close the windows, doors, then run a portable air cleaner with a HEPA filter," says Henderson.

It's important to not add to indoor pollution by cooking with gas, frying food, smoking, or even vacuuming, says the CDC. If forced to venture outside, the CDC also recommends wearing an N95 respirator tightly fitted to your face: COVID-19 surgical masks and other homemade face coverings won't protect you from the smoke.

"At the end of the day there's only so much you can do," says Bein, emphasizing that long-term planning must attempt to mitigate the kinds of fires currently plaguing Californians. New policies around prescribed burns as well as where homes can be built and what sort of features those homes should come with are solutions stakeholders need to tackle, Bein says.

"I think that's going to be one of humanity's greatest challenges," he says. "Not just wildfires but all the extreme events resulting from climate change. We are entering a new phase of reality we just can't reverse."

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How breathing in wildfire smoke affects the body

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For the more than seven million people in California's Bay Area living through historic wildfires, it's been hard to breathe for the past month. For 29 days the region has been under a " Spare the Air" alert, which means inhaling outdoor air presents a health hazard.

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A 53-year-old woman presents with a 3-day history of generalized body fatigue, fever, weakness, and shortness of breath. The patient's medical history is significant for achalasia but otherwise is noncontributory. At triage, the patient's vital signs are taken. An electrocardiogram (ECG) shows atrial flutter. A chest radiograph reveals bibasilar infiltrates and bilateral pleural effusions, indicative of pneumonia. Complete blood cell count and complete metabolic panel results are within normal limits.

Because radiography shows infiltrates and the patient is having trouble breathing and is experiencing progressively worsening fever, chills, sweats, and rigors, she is admitted, treated with intravenous (IV) antibiotics, and monitored.

The patient converts to a normal sinus rhythm after admission but shortly thereafter goes into shock ( Table 1). Her heart rate increases to 109 beats per minute, her blood pressure decreases, and her O ₂ saturation level drops to 92%, despite delivery of 4 liters of O ₂ per minute via nasal cannula. Collectively, these changes indicate systemic inflammatory response syndrome and hypoxic respiratory failure.

A second chest radiograph shows increasing interstitial and alveolar radiodensities in the lower lungs. The patient's antibiotic regimen is changed to levofloxacin, piperacillin/tazobactam, and vancomycin. The patient is transferred to the intensive care unit (ICU) and placed on a ventilator. A pulmonologist is called to consult on the case. Cultures for Legionella antigens, influenza A and B, and methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus are negative.

A CT scan of the chest, which is more sensitive and specific for aspiration pneumonia, empyema, and abscess than radiographs, shows diffuse alveolar and ground glass opacities, a common finding in early interstitial lung disease. 1,2 Although cultures did not reveal any significant abnormal findings, a bronchoscopy recovers slightly sanguineous, cloudy fluid.

After the patient is on a ventilator for 10 days, sputum cultures are positive for Candida albicans infection, a common cause of nosocomial sinusitis and a common sequela of endotracheal intubation due to impairment of sinus drainage. ³ A therapeutic thoracentesis is considered, but because the effusions remain stable, it is deemed unnecessary.

During the next 4 days of hospitalization, the patient continues to be febrile, with her temperature ranging from 37.5°C to 38°C, and her respiratory rate is 20 to 30 breaths per minute. However, chest radiographs show progressively decreasing bibasilar infiltrates.

After another 5 days of intubation, the respiratory therapy team attempts ventilator weaning, which initially fails. Her laboratory values show hypocalcemia, hypokalemia, and anemia. The following day, the patient appears more comfortable, more easily aroused, and a chest radiograph reveals considerably less bibasilar infiltrates. Due to these improvements, the respiratory team decides to reattempt ventilator weaning. Pulmonology provides continuous positive airway pressure ventilation, with gradual weaning from the pressure support to increase the likelihood of spontaneous breathing. Weaning from the ventilator is successful.

For the next 4 days, the patient continues IV antibiotics and daily chest radiographs to monitor her bibasilar infiltrates. At discharge, the patient is instructed to take oral antibiotics and practice breathing with a spirometer to increase her forced expiratory volume capacity. She follows up with the pulmonologist every 2 weeks for the next 2 months to monitor for the complete resolution of the bibasilar infiltrates and effusions on chest radiograph.

From the October 2020 Issue of Clinical Advisor

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Aspiration Pneumonia Mistaken for Community- Acquired Pneumonia - Clinical Advisor

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A 53-year-old woman presents with a 3-day history of generalized body fatigue, fever, weakness, and shortness of breath. The patient's medical history is significant for achalasia but otherwise is noncontributory. At triage, the patient's vital signs are taken. An electrocardiogram (ECG) shows atrial flutter.

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VIDEO: Coronavirus infection can damage your lungs

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Doctors have said that patients who have recovered from the coronavirus are at risk of developing pulmonary fibrosis, or scarring of the lungs that causes fatigue and shortness of breath.

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Curious Kids: what happens if you breathe pure oxygen?

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You might think the more oxygen you breathe in the better. But too much oxygen can make you sick.

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The toxic substances in cigarette smoke can cause lung damage by triggering inflammation and destroying the elasticity and structure of the lungs’ air passages and air sacs. Additionally, cigarette smoke eliminates the lungs’ cilia (the structures responsible for clearing mucus), and the resulting mucus buildup can give rise to infection.

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Various materials found in some homes, including asbestos, bird protein, mold and radon, can lead to lung damage.

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Consistently inhaling air pollutants can cause lung inflammation, which may eventually result in lung damage.

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Certain medical conditions may cause lung damage, including alpha-1 antitrypsin deficiency, lupus, mixed-connective tissue disease, polymyositis/dermatomyositis, pulmonary vasculitis, rheumatoid arthritis, sarcoidosis, scleroderma, Sjogren’s syndrome and undifferentiated connective tissue disease. Additionally, people who have close relatives who were diagnosed with emphysema have an elevated risk of developing emphysema themselves given their similar genetic characteristics.

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Treatments for certain medical conditions can cause lung damage. For instance, chemotherapy (particularly cyclophosphamide and methotrexate) and radiation therapy (especially that for lung or breast cancer) may lead to lung damage. Certain antibiotics (including nitrofurantoin and sulfasalazine), anticonvulsants, antiarrhythmics and heart medications (including amiodarone and propranolol) can also lead to lung damage.