Lung Inflammation - Causes And Symptoms Of Pneumonia

2024 Author: Josephine Shorter | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 21:43

Pneumonia

Causes and symptoms of pneumonia

What is pneumonia?

Inflammation of the lungs (pneumonia) is today considered a serious disease, despite a wide range of antibacterial drugs - the most effective drugs in the fight against the disease. Before the discovery of antibiotics and their widespread use in medical practice, pneumonia was considered a fatal disease, which caused the death of millions of people of all ages and classes.

When diagnosing pneumonia, the patient is most often sent to a hospital, where doctors have the opportunity to monitor the treatment process using X-ray and laboratory studies.

Causes of pneumonia

Viruses, bacteria and fungi with severe pneumotropicity become the main cause of pneumonia. These include staphylococci, streptococci, pneumococci, mycoplasmas, influenza viruses and respiratory viruses, Candida fungi.

In most cases, pneumonia occurs against the background of inflammatory diseases of the upper respiratory tract, but in some cases, the inflammatory process develops directly in the lung tissue.

Risk factors include decreased immunity, colds, burns of the mucous membrane of the upper respiratory tract, exposure to toxic substances that cause suffocation, inhalation of gaseous substances that irritate the upper respiratory tract, such as dichlorvos.

Lung inflammation symptoms

Inflammation of the lungs can occur in acute and chronic form, in turn, an acute inflammatory process can manifest itself in the form of croupous or focal pneumonia.

Croupous inflammation of the lungs manifests itself in the form of damage to an entire lobe of the lung. The causative agents of the disease are pneumococci. Most often, the pathology is not preceded by acute respiratory infections or any other infection. The symptoms of pneumonia appear suddenly and are acute.

The patient's body temperature rises sharply, reaching high numbers, chills occur, pain in the side on one side. Painful sensations intensify during a deep breath and when coughing. Shortness of breath develops rapidly, to which a dry cough may soon join. At the initial stage of the disease, cough is rare; over time, its intensity may increase, and the cough becomes obsessive. In some cases, on the first day after the onset of the first symptoms of the disease, there may be no cough.

The patient's appearance changes: the neck becomes bright red or becomes covered with red spots from the side of the affected lung, the nostrils are swollen, the lips turn a little blue. In some cases, the patient loses consciousness and is delirious. After a couple of days, the cough becomes not as dry as at the beginning of the disease, a small amount of transparent viscous sputum with streaks of blood appears, on the next day the blood in the sputum becomes more pronounced and gives it a brownish tint, the color of the secretion when coughing resembles rust.

Painful sensations during breathing are associated with the presence of nerve fibers in the pleura (a thin film on the surface of the lung). In a healthy person, the pleura does not take part in the act of breathing, while in a patient with pneumonia, it is involved in this process. Croupous pneumonia almost always causes disorders of the cardiovascular system, patients have tachycardia and changes in heart rate. The disease can last for a long time. In the first two weeks, patients, as a rule, retain all the symptoms of pneumonia, making the course of the disease severe enough, after about a crescent, the disease begins to gradually recede. The consequence of pathology can be a lung abscess, as well as diseases of the heart and blood vessels.

Focal pneumonia is characterized by inflammation of a specific area of the lung. The symptoms of the disease also develop sharply, the disease begins with a rise in body temperature to high values and with symptoms characteristic of severe intoxication (general weakness, malaise). In most cases, the cough appears immediately, it can be dry or moist. Since the inflammation proceeds without the formation of pus, when coughing, serous sputum is released, in which blood streaks can occur. Chest pain may be absent or mild. With the further course of the disease, the volume of the secretion increases, and the discharge itself can become purulent. Focal pneumonia most often occurs against the background of previous viral or bacterial infections of the upper respiratory tract.

With timely treatment and correctly selected drug therapy, the patient's temperature drops five days after the onset of the inflammatory process, at about the same time the patient's condition begins to improve. The duration of the disease is on average 3-4 weeks. An urgent problem today is the asymptomatic course of focal pneumonia and the transition of an acute form of the disease to a chronic one, experts see the reason for this in self-medication, namely in the frequent use of antibiotics without a doctor's prescription.

Chronic pneumonia most often develops after acute pneumonia, if the focus of infection persists in the affected organ. Each exacerbation leaves a mark in the lung in the form of connective tissue that forms in the focus of inflammation instead of lung tissue, thus, pneumosclerosis becomes a complication of recurrent pneumonia. The consequences of chronic inflammation of the lungs affect the functioning of the organ, the supply of oxygen to tissues is disrupted, the load on the heart doubles, and diseases of the cardiovascular system develop. All this leads to the development of pulmonary heart disease.

Symptoms of pneumonia, occurring in a chronic form, are chest pain on one side (from the affected lung), cough, a slight increase in body temperature to subfebrile, malaise, weakness, in rare cases hemoptysis is noted.

Pneumonia treatment

Patients with acute pneumonia and exacerbation of a chronic infectious process require hospitalization. For all forms of this disease, regardless of the nature of its course, antibacterial drugs are prescribed. The resistance of modern strains of bacteria and viruses to penicillins does not allow doctors in the treatment of pneumonia to limit themselves to the use of drugs of only this group of antibiotics.

The most popular among specialists were cephalosporin, amoxicillin, clavulanate, levofloxacin, sulfamethoxazole. When the symptoms of the disease develop slowly, it is recommended to use antibiotics, which include sulfur.

Therapy of viral pneumonia requires the appointment of not only antibacterial drugs, but also medicines with antiviral activity. With fungal forms of pneumonia, the doctor must necessarily prescribe drugs that suppress the vital activity of a certain type of fungus.

It is important for patients who have been diagnosed with pneumonia to remember the dangers of self-medication: it can have the most tragic consequences. Patients must necessarily undergo fluoroscopy, do a blood test, it is also desirable to examine sputum in a laboratory.

Article author: Mochalov Pavel Alexandrovich | d. m. n. therapist

Education: Moscow Medical Institute. IM Sechenov, specialty - "General Medicine" in 1991, in 1993 "Occupational Diseases", in 1996 "Therapy".