If you are a parent or guardian, then you know what it's like to worry about your children's health, whether it's concern about illnesses, unhealthy environments, or risk for future disease. This worry is natural, and even rational, as early childhood experiences can have an effect your children's long-term health.

Childhood is a particularly vulnerable time for young lungs, in fact, which are much smaller, narrower, and more susceptible to injury compared to adult lungs. Because of this, children's lungs need extra protection from illness and airborne hazards like pollution and smoke.

Unfortunately, lung damage sustained during childhood can significantly increase a child's risk for asthma and lung problems later in life. It can even set the stage for more serious lung conditions that appear in older adulthood, including COPD.

Fortunately, there are a variety of different precautions you can take to minimize your child's risk for lung damage and disease. But in order to do so, you first need to understand children's lung sensitivities and how to recognize a variety of different substances and activities and that are hazardous to their lungs.

That's why we created this guide specifically for parents who want to know how to keep their children's lungs safe and healthy as they grow. It includes dozens of practical tips for reducing the number of respiratory hazards in your child's lives and helpful strategies for creating a more lung-healthy home.

We'll start by explaining how illnesses, environment, and lifestyle can affect your children's lungs and even pre-dispose them to lung problems later in life. Then, we'll explain how to make some simple changes to household habits and routines in order to minimize your children's exposure to respiratory irritants at home.

Finally, we'll discuss what you can do to prepare your children with the knowledge and values they need to take care of their lungs for the rest of their life. In these sections, you'll find helpful advice (curated from experts) for talking to your kids about smoking, as well as additional tips for teaching them the skills they need for good respiratory health.

Why Worry About Lung Disease So Young?

Most serious lung diseases, like COPD, begin in older adulthood, which is usually when the first major symptoms start to appear. Because of this, it might seem strange to start worrying about lung disease so early in your child's life.

However, it's important to understand that COPD is caused by lung damage, and lung damage that leads to COPD usually happens much earlier in life. However, because COPD tends to develop very slowly over the course of many years, the results of that damage might take decades to show.

Most cases of COPD are caused by smoking, but research shows that many other factors besides smoking can contribute to the disease. These factors include early childhood experiences, including respiratory infections and exposure to environmental hazards like smoke.

Because children's lungs are small and still developing, they are even more sensitive to these hazards than adults. This makes them more likely to sustain lung damage from breathing toxic substances, and also increases the risk that this damage will result in long-term effects.

This is also one of the reasons why children develop asthma during childhood, and sometimes later as adults. After all, experts have long known that a child's risk for asthma is strongly influenced by illnesses and harmful substances in their environment.

Because of this, it's particularly important to protect children from lung-damaging substances early in life. Doing so can reduce their risk for lung problems in adulthood, both minor (e.g. reduced overall lung function) and severe (e.g. COPD).

If you are a parent who has COPD, or if you know a loved one with the disease, then you probably have an idea of how terrible and painful it can be. Fortunately, if you are willing to take action in your home and in other areas of your children's lives, you can significantly reduce their risk for lung problems both now and later in life.

Is Your Child At Risk for Lung Disease?

Now that we've established that children's lungs are vulnerable at an early age, let's take a closer look at what specific kinds of things can put their respiratory health at risk. Researchers have identified a number of early childhood risk factors for asthma, COPD, and other lung diseases, most of which you can prevent.

Exposure to Air Pollution and Respiratory Irritants

There are many different kinds of substances that can damage the lungs when you breathe them in, including noxious chemicals, gases, and small airborne particles. Unfortunately, we encounter many of these substances every single day both outdoors and inside our own homes.

Because of this, it's not realistic to avoid respiratory irritants entirely; however, you can take steps to minimize how much and how often your children breathe them in. This is particularly important if your child has asthma or another respiratory condition that makes their lungs extra sensitive to irritation.

Fortunately, there are many things you can do to reduce the amount of air pollution and other respiratory irritants your children are exposed to at home. In fact, we'll show you a variety of practical tips and techniques later in this guide to help you make your house a safer environment for developing lungs.

Common respiratory irritants include:

• Air pollution (both indoors and outdoors)
• Fumes from wood-burning fireplaces and stoves
• Chemical fumes from cleaning solutions and household chemicals
• Volatile Organic Compounds (or VOC's) found in products like paints, solvents, perfumes, pesticides, and chemically treated lumber
• Smoke and second-hand smoke

This list covers only a few of many potential respiratory hazards that could affect your children's lungs. We'll go over many more examples, including specific household sources of respiratory irritants, all throughout this guide.

Childhood Asthma

If your child suffers from asthma, that factor alone can make them more likely to develop COPD later in life. In fact, research has established a very strong link between asthma and COPD, especially severe and persistent childhood asthma.

This connection is at least partially caused by chronic inflammation in the lungs and airways, a symptom that both asthma and COPD share. Over time, the inflammation caused by asthma can cause irreversible changes to lung tissues, resulting in airway obstruction and permanent lung function loss.

In other words, asthma can cause the exact same type of lung damage that leads to COPD.

This is known as Asthma-COPD Overlap Syndrome, and it's more common in children who experience severe and frequent asthma symptoms. The risk is much lower for children whose symptoms are mild or well controlled.

Unfortunately, having asthma also makes your child's lungs more susceptible to the damaging effects of respiratory irritants (also known as asthma triggers) like allergens, cooking fumes, and smoke. This means that a child with asthma has a higher risk for COPD if they are repeatedly exposed to these hazards.

Respiratory Infections

Research shows that children who have severe respiratory infections—such as pneumonia and bronchitis—in early childhood are more likely to develop COPD in adulthood. The reason for this is that lung infections can damage the delicate, under-developed tissues in a child's lungs, resulting in respiratory decline and sensitivity that can last for the rest of their lives.

One study, for example, found that people who had a serious respiratory infection before the age of five were more likely to have reduced lung function and asthma in adulthood. It also made them more susceptible to the negative effects of second-hand smoke, which can cause severe asthma symptoms and permanent lung function decline.

The risk for for respiratory problems is higher for children whose infections are severe, repeated, or occur at a very early age. Unfortunately, all of the factors we've mentioned—serious lung infections, asthma, and reduced lung function—are all factors that can increase a child's risk for COPD.

Exposure to Smoke and Second-Hand Smoke

Repeated exposure to second-hand smoke is hard on developing lungs, and it can cause measurable, long-term damage that persists into adulthood. It can also make a child's lungs more prone to future damage, which increases the health dangers of smoking—and exposure to other respiratory irritants—for the rest of their life.

Research shows children who were frequently exposed to second-hand smoke grow up to have poorer lung function in adulthood. These children are also more likely to develop COPD decades later, even if they stay smoke-free throughout their lives.

Even smoking while pregnant (or simply being exposed to second-hand smoke during pregnancy) can affect your child's long-term health. For example, children born to mothers who smoked while they were pregnant may suffer from permanently reduced lung function and a higher risk for respiratory conditions like asthma and COPD.

However, the potential for respiratory problems is only one of many reasons why you should protect your child from second-hand smoke. Research shows that second-hand smoke exposure during childhood can lead to a variety of serious health problems later in life, including high blood pressure, heart disease, and stroke.

Here is a more extensive list of health problems caused by childhood exposure to second-hand smoke:

• Ear infections
• Tooth decay
• Illnesses like coughs and colds
• Respiratory infections like pneumonia and bronchitis
• Increased risk of developing asthma
• Increased risk of cognitive problems and learning disabilities
• Increased risk for ADHD
• Increased risk for heart disease later in life
• Increased risk of being a smoker
• Acute respiratory symptoms, including:
• coughing
• wheezing
• breathlessness
• phlegm

Negative health problems caused by smoking during pregnancy:

• Lower birth weight (which can lead to other health complications)
• Increased risk for sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS)
• Increased risk for miscarriage and stillbirth
• Increased risk for developmental problems, including learning disabilities
• Reduced lung function
• Increased risk for asthma and other lung conditions

Early Prevention is Key

It's important to realize that lung damage is cumulative, which means that repeated exposure to lung-damaging particles and environments can add up over time. Too much exposure to respiratory hazards over the course of a lifetime can trigger COPD, even if no single event or exposure can be traced back as the cause.

Most people only get COPD from smoking or from exposure to other airborne substances (e.g. chemical fumes and second-hand smoke) if it happens repeatedly over an extended period of time. But because COPD is such a slow-moving disease, it usually takes years for the long-term damage to show.

Part of the reason it takes so long is that lungs are extremely resilient; they have enough extra capacity built in to compensate for a lot of damage. You can lose a surprising amount of lung function before it begins to noticeably affect your ability to breathe.

Unfortunately, this also means that it's impossible to know whether or not you have COPD until your lungs have already been severely damaged by the disease. You have to lose a large percentage of your lung function before you can be diagnosed with COPD, and it's notoriously difficult to catch in the early stages.

Because of this—and the fact that there is no cure for COPD—prevention is absolutely key. The only true way to prevent COPD, however, is to protect your lungs from hazards like air pollution and smoke as much as possible throughout your life.

This should begin in early childhood, when the lungs are particularly vulnerable to the environment. In fact, it should begin in pregnancy, when any harmful substances a mother gets exposed to can lead to health problems after the baby is born.

How to Reduce Early Childhood Risk Factors for Lung Problems

Fortunately, most of the major childhood risk factors for asthma and COPD are preventable as long as you take the right precautions. Let's take a look at some specific actions you can take while your children are young to minimize their lung disease risks.

Quit Smoking

If you are a smoker, then quitting is—by far—the best thing you can do to keep your children's lungs healthy and safe. After all, research shows that parents are the main source of second-hand smoke exposure during childhood, and that simply living with a parent who smokes can significantly increase a child's risk for lung disease later in life.

One study, for example, found that children who live with a smoker are 31 percent more likely to die from COPD as adults. Smoking can also have an immediate effect on your child's respiratory health, increasing their risk for lung infections and respiratory illness-related hospitalizations.

According to the EPA, second-hand smoke causes up to 300,000 extra cases of lower respiratory tract infections in children under 18 months of age. As we discussed earlier in this guide, childhood respiratory infections are another major risk factor for developing COPD.

Minimize Your Child's Exposure to Outdoor Air Pollution

Outdoor air pollution is a common respiratory hazard that can cause serious damage to lungs. Air pollution is even more dangerous for children because, in addition to being more vulnerable to lung damage, children get higher doses of air pollution due to their faster breathing rate.

In fact, one major air pollution study (pdf link) found that children who grow up in areas with higher than normal outdoor pollution experienced permanent respiratory decline. Their lungs not only developed more slowly than usual, but also functioned less effectively as adults.

Children with asthma are even more sensitive to air pollution, which can exacerbate asthma symptoms and make them more likely to develop other lung problems like bronchitis and COPD. In many cases, the effects of air pollution are irreversible, which means that children who are exposed to heavy air pollution during childhood may have weakened lungs for the rest of their lives.

Because of this, it's a good to get in the habit of checking the the air pollution levels in your city, which can change significantly from day to day. Then, do your best to plan your children's outdoor activities during days when the outdoor air quality is good.

Keep in mind that things like the weather, temperature, and the even time of day can influence both the amount and the types of pollutants in the air. If you keep your children indoors on days when air quality is poor, you can minimize their exposure to the dangers of heavy pollution.

While this might seem inconvenient, limiting how much time your child spends outside breathing polluted air can make a difference in their respiratory health. In most places, you can still ensure plenty of outside playtime on low-pollution days.

However, in some cities, air pollution is so persistent and heavy that it's impossible to avoid. If you live in an area like this, you may have fewer options for protecting your children's lungs.

In some cases, the best option is to move away from the pollution to a city with cleaner air. However, moving your family somewhere new is not a cheap or easy task, and it's simply not a realistic option for many.

But even if you can't get away from polluted outdoor air, what you can do is put extra effort into protecting your children from the respiratory hazards that you do have the power to control (e.g. smoke and chemical fumes). You should also watch your children closely for persistent respiratory symptoms that could indicate a developing problem with their lungs.

Protect Your Child from Respiratory Illnesses

As we've mentioned a couple times already, serious respiratory infections can significantly increase your child's risk for asthma and COPD. That's one reason why it's important to take precaution to prevent your child from getting sick.

Most common respiratory illnesses are minor, but young children have a higher risk of developing complications. If the illness becomes serious, it has the potential to cause permanent lung damage that will follow them through the rest of their lives.

The best way to prevent the spread of illnesses is to practice proper hygiene and teach your kids to look after their own hygiene, too. You should also take care to keep your children away from other children or adults who are sick.

If your child does get sick a with respiratory illness, you should keep a close eye on their symptoms until they get better. Over time, even a simple cold or flu can turn in to a more serious infection like bronchitis or pneumonia.

Unfortunately, it can be difficult to tell the signs of a respiratory infection apart from a less serious illness like a cold, so don't hesitate to call the doctor if you are worried about your child's symptoms. You should also take them to the doctor if their symptoms become severe or if they don't start to get better after being sick for several days.

Here are some of the most common symptoms of pneumonia in children to look out for:

• Rapid breathing
• Difficulty breathing
• Exerting extra effort to breathe
• A grunting or wheezing sound with breathing
• Shaking or chills
• Pain in the chest and/or abdomen
• Vomiting
• Fatigue or reduced energy
• Loss of appetite
• Bluish or gray skin color in the lips or fingernails (this is a sign of a medical emergency)

If you notice any of the above symptoms or otherwise suspect your child might have pneumonia, you should take them to the doctor right away. You should also make sure your child is up to date with all their vaccinations, but especially those that protect against respiratory illnesses like whooping cough, pneumonia, and influenza.

You should be extra cautious with children under the age of five, whose lungs are the most sensitive to to the damaging effects of infection. After all, pneumonia is one of the leading causes of death in young children, especially children under the age of two.

How to Create a Lung-Healthy Environment at Home

Believe it or not, the place where your children are most likely to be exposed to hazardous respiratory irritants is inside their own home. There are two main reasons for this: First, children tend to spend a large quantity of their time indoors, and the majority of that time is spent at home.

Second, many homes have poor indoor air quality due to unhealthy levels of airborne particles and fumes. In fact, research shows that a large percentage of houses have air quality that's poor enough to cause noticeable respiratory effects, especially in children with asthma.

Because of this, one of the best ways to protect your child's lungs is to minimize the amount of respiratory hazards they are exposed to at home. There are many simple ways to this, including removing sources of airborne irritants and making adjustments to household habits (e.g. cooking and cleaning).

Keep Your Home Smoke Free

Tobacco smoke, and smoke in general, is one of the most dangerous respiratory hazards you can have in your home. Even long after the source of smoke is gone, dangerous gases and airborne particles can persist for days or even months indoors.

As a result, no amount of indoor smoking is ever considered safe, especially in a house with children. Even if you only smoke in the house when your kids are not around, the air will still be contaminated when they return.

Because of this, making your house 100% smoke free is a vital part of creating a safe and clean environment for your kids. That means prohibiting any kind of smoking inside your house, and also outside the house near any open windows and entrances that could allow the smoke to drift indoors.

Other sources of smoke, like

If you're like just about everybody else in the world, you probably have a variety of different goals and aspirations. You might not even think of them as “goals,” but everyone can think of certain things in their life that they want to change or achieve.

These include things you'd like to learn, activities you'd like to do, and career milestones you'd like to reach. Your goals can also include things you'd like to improve about yourself, such as your exercise habits, your sleeping schedule, or your ability to stick to a routine.

If you have a chronic lung disease like COPD, goal-setting can also be an effective tool for managing your disease. By helping you establish better habits related to your physical, social, and mental health, setting goals can help you live a happier, healthier life with COPD.

In fact, doctors of patients with COPD often recommend that their patients set goals for healthy lifestyle changes like losing weight, getting more exercise, or quitting smoking. If you can push yourself to achieve those goals, it can make a significant difference in your symptoms, your physical endurance, and your risk for serious health complications.

That's why, in this post, we're going to show you how to use goal-setting techniques to improve your health and overall wellness while living with a chronic lung condition like COPD. We'll teach you how to create goals that are smart, effective, and guide you toward success.

We'll show you how to define your goals clearly and flesh them out in a way that makes it easy to plan and track your progress. Then, we'll show you how to use those goals as a roadmap to achieving—and maintaining—a better quality of life with COPD.

Goal-Setting for COPD

As just about anyone living with severe COPD can tell you, COPD is a disease that can impact every part of your life. It can affect your energy, your mobility, your daily routine, and even your mental and emotional health.

That's why goal-setting is so important; it allows you to take back control of your life and adjust to the many changes that COPD brings. It can give you that extra edge you need attain the things you want in life in spite of all the ways that COPD can make things more difficult.

Most importantly, knowing how to set effective goals can help you make important habit changes that are vital for maintaining your health and managing your disease. That includes things like eating healthy, quitting smoking, and keeping up with your COPD treatments; a good goal-setting strategy can make all of these things much easier to achieve.

The Benefits of Goal-Setting

It's one thing to know what you want or what you need, but it's quite another thing to actually be able to get there. That's the point of goal-setting: to write down all the things you'd like to (or need to) do in a way that makes them easier to reference and work toward.

Essentially, goal-setting is a method for clarifying your long-term wants and needs and breaking them down into simple steps. It's a useful structure for turning the ideas in your head into practical goals that you can take action on.

The process of goal-setting forces you to think about your goals from a different perspective and come up with strategies you can use to make progress. It also steers you toward action, by acting as a roadmap to guide you through the steps to meet your goals.

Here are some of the main benefits of goal-setting (pdf link):

• Improved motivation
• Improved self-confidence and self-image
• Increased chance of reaching your goals
• Helps you set priorities and identify what's important to you
• Helps you identify your strengths and weaknesses
• Helps you track your progress and build on success
• Helps you focus on what's realistic and what you have power to change
• Serves as a guideline for how to achieve your goals

Goal-setting can be particularly helpful for people with COPD, who often have to manage a plethora of medications, treatments, and lifestyle changes in order to maintain their health. The goal-setting process can help you sort through all those responsibilities and set up a structure to keep you on track.

But you don't have to just take our word for it. Most experts agree that going through the goal-setting process (which we'll teach you in this post) is an effective way to achieve and make progress in many areas of life.

For example, the Oxford Research Encyclopedia for Psychology names goal-setting theory as “among the most valid and useful theories of motivation of organizational behavior.” This claim is backed up by a meta-analysis of research studies on goal-setting and behavior changes, which concludes that goal setting is “an effective behavior change technique that has the potential to be considered a fundamental component of successful [psychological] interventions.”

Another study looked specifically at patients with COPD, and whether or not the SMART goal-setting method (which we'll discuss in more detail below) could help them reach their physical activity goals. The results were encouraging; after twenty weeks of working toward those goals with the help of weekly counseling sessions, patients showed measurable improvements in their physical endurance and reduced shortness of breath.

You can use goal-setting to achieve all sorts of things, including:

• Creating better health and lifestyle habits
• Maintaining healthy habits you already have
• Adjusting to new treatments and routines
• Tracking and improving your COPD symptoms
• Keeping up with medications and treatments
• Getting rid of unhealthy habits like smoking
• Reducing your risk for exacerbations
• Budgeting and saving for things you desire (e.g. travel, entertainment, and possessions)
• Funding important needs (e.g. medical equipment, bills, and debt)
• Just about any other thing (that's realistic) you would like to do, have, or achieve.

Some of your goals will come from your own personal desires, and some may originate from other sources, like work, family, or your doctor. But by going through the process of goal-setting, you make those goals your own and define them in a way that's useful and personal to you.

Making Your Goals Effective

Coming up with goals in general might seem easy, but it takes a little more effort to create practical goals that work. If you want your goals to help you move forward, you need to take the time to define and develop them fully.

If your goals are too broad or vague, for example, it will be hard to find a starting point and make meaningful progress toward your goals. It's hard to move forward when you don't have a clear path to follow or an obvious objective to reach.

On the other hand, goals with a narrower scope are much easier to achieve. When you know exactly what you're working toward, it's much easier to take action and figure out what you need to do to achieve your goal.

Fortunately, there's an established method known as "SMART gaol-setting" that you can use to create more effective goals.

The SMART goal-setting method is recommended by experts in a variety of different fields, including business, psychology, academia, healthcare, and even COPD Treatment (PDF link). That's why we are going to use this technique as a baseline throughout this guide.

Essentially, the SMART method defines a certain set of criteria that all of your goals ought to meet. The purpose of these criteria is to guide you through the goal-setting process and ensure that your goals are useful, actionable, and easy to understand.

To make them simple to remember, each criterion for a SMART goal corresponds to one of the letters in the SMART acronym.

SMART goals must be...

• Specific
• Measurable
• Achievable
• Relevant
• Time-Bound

Using the SMART criteria can help you clarify your goals and define them in practical, concrete terms. Smart goals not only tell you what you want to achieve, but they give you direction for how to achieve them, too.

Let's take a closer look at each of the main criteria for a SMART goal.

Specific

First, it's important to be specific about what exactly it is that you want to achieve. Vague statements and general ideas just won't cut it; you need a clearly-defined goal that tells you precisely what you're working toward.

For example, “I want to improve my diet” is a vague goal that doesn't give you an obvious path forward. In order to make it better and easier to accomplish, you need to narrow it down and specify what it is about your diet that you'd like to change.

In many cases, you can break down a vague goal into several different, more specific goals. For example, you could turn “I want to improve my diet” into “I want to achieve a better balance nutritional balance of protein, carbs, and fat” or “I want to limit myself to one snack per day” instead.

Measurable

Second, your goal should be measurable, as in it needs to be bound by clear criteria that let you know when you've actually met the goal. This requires you to be clear and precise about what your end goal is.

For example, “Spend more time with family” isn't exactly measurable; it doesn't specify how much time you need to spend with your family in order to achieve your goal. On the other hand, “Spend one hour of quality time with family every day” is something you can actually measure and work toward on a day-to-day basis.

Attainable

Some goals just aren't realistic. If you set a goal you cannot reasonably achieve, then you'll just be setting yourself up for failure and disappointment.

That's why it's important to set goals that you think you can realistically attain. That doesn't mean you have to aim low, but it does mean you need to consider whether or not you have the skills, physical ability, and basic disposition that are required to meet your goals.

This is particularly important to consider for health and physical goals, especially if you have COPD. While you can still make improvements to your health, you may need to work with your doctor and carefully consider any physical limitations you have throughout the process of crafting your goals.

In some cases, you can make your goal more attainable simply by gathering more information or learning a new skill. In other cases, you may need to re-frame your goal or change it to something more modest or more suitable to your abilities.

For example, lets say you have severe COPD and you're trying to improve your physical strength. If you currently struggle to make it up a flight of stairs, then “Running a mile every day” might not be a realistic goal to start with.

It's better to start smaller, with goals you know you can achieve, such as taking a 20 minute walk every day. You can always change your goal or add more later, or set another, higher goal once you've achieved the one you already set.

Relevant

It's important to keep your goals focused and relevant to the things you want to achieve. In other words, you want to make sure that your goals make sense, and that they will actually be able to move you toward the things you want and need.

For example, lets say you're setting some goals to make your living space more accommodating to your mobility needs. “Re-arrange the living room furniture to create more open floor space” might be a relevant goal, while “Installing the new curtains,” even if it's needed, isn't exactly relevant to the problem you're currently trying to solve.

Time-Bound

Finally, effective goals should be time-bound, which simply means that you should specify a time frame for achieving your goals. It could be a deadline, like a due date for a project, or it could be a specific interval like “every day” or “once a week” that you are supposed to complete your goal.

This helps you stay focused on taking action and moving forward rather than procrastinating or putting your goals off to the future. It also helps you plan out your objectives and evaluate how well you are progressing over time.

Goals Versus Objectives

Understanding the distinction between goals and objectives is important for effective goal-setting. The main difference is this: Goals are the big things you want to achieve, while objectives are smaller steps along the way to reaching goals.

Goals represent an endpoint, they tell you where you're trying to go. Objectives tell you how to get there; they define specific actions you need to take in order to reach your goals.

Part of the process of goal-setting is coming up with some smaller objectives to go along with each of your goals. You can do this by breaking your goal down into smaller, simpler chunks and writing down the specific actions that will help you achieve it.

Your list of objectives should give you a solid foundation to start from; it is essentially your action plan for how to reach your goal. With all the steps you need to take already laid out in front of you, you'll find that it's much easier to make forward progress.

How to Set Objectives

Coming up with specific objectives to match your goals requires thoughtfulness and precision. In many ways, it's an exercise in planning ahead and paying attention to detail.

Just like your goals, your objectives are personal and should be tailored to your unique environment and needs. Think of them as the building blocks of your own unique strategy for pushing yourself toward your goals.

Because of this, your objectives need to take into account the resources available to you as well as any personal characteristics that could affect how you approach your goals. That includes things like your current knowledge, skills, strengths, weaknesses, preferences, and limitations.

For example, if one of your goals is to start a new hobby, you'll need to consider a wide range of factors in order to come up with realistic objectives. You'll need to consider your weekly schedule, your current knowledge (and gaps in knowledge) about the hobby, what kinds of resources (e.g. hobby stores and social clubs) are available where you live, and more.

Here are some questions you can ask yourself to help you narrow down your objectives:

• What tasks do I have to complete before I can reach my goal?
• Do I have all the knowledge and information I need to complete my goal?
• Do I need to learn any new skills to complete my goal?
• Do I need any specific supplies or equipment to reach my goal?
• What kinds of tools or resources (including people) might be able to assist me in reaching my goal?

Here's an example to illustrate what the process of coming up with objectives might look like.

Let's say that your general goal is to get more physical activity. More specifically, your SMART goal is to exercise for 30 minutes at least three times per week.

Once you've defined that goal, try to picture what working toward that goal would actually look like. What kinds of exercises could you do? How will it fit into your schedule? Is there any specific knowledge or supplies will you need?

For instance, if you're not experienced with exercise, your first objective might be to figure out how to get started. More specifically, your objective could be to do research on how to exercise safely and effectively or to ask your doctor for advice on beginning a new physical activity regimen.

If you have COPD, then symptoms like shortness of breath might be factors that influence your exercise objectives. If physical activity makes it difficult to breathe, then learning some new skills to help you manage your breathing while you exercise might be a good first step toward your goal.

You could, for example, make it one of your objectives to join a pulmonary rehabilitation class, practice breathing exercises, or to use mucus clearance techniques before you work out. Another objective could be exercising on days when your energy levels are highest, or working with your doctor to figure out how to manage your breathing symptoms better.

Choosing Goals that Matter to You

Everyone has desires and aspirations, but no two people's goals are exactly the same. Your career, lifestyle, physical health, and your own unique desires all help shape the things you want to achieve.

When you are living with a chronic health condition like COPD, some of those goals are probably influenced by your disease. These can include personal aspirations for your health and the things your doctor recommends that you do to manage your disease.

In order to choose a set of goals that is right for you, you will need to put some real thought into what you want and need in your life. Think about what you'd like to improve about your body, your mind, your social life, your living space, and your overall well-being.

For people with COPD, life is often filled with uncertainty: uncertainty about health, uncertainty about the future, and uncertainty about how bad your symptoms will be on a given day. That's why it's especially important for people with COPD have a safe, familiar place to retreat to when they need to get away from the stresses and inconveniences of the outside world.

For most people, that safe space is their home.

Home is one of the only places where you have the power to control your space and the environment that surrounds you. This is an advantage that you shouldn't take for granted—especially if you have a mobility-limiting condition like COPD.

When you're living with chronic disease and/or disability, the design of the space you live in can be a critical factor in your overall quality of life. It can mean the difference between being able to navigate your home comfortably and not being able to complete basic household tasks.

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Unfortunately, many people with COPD never get to see their true potential because their home was never adapted to accommodate their COPD. Fortunately, making your home more COPD-friendly doesn't have to be a large or expensive project, regardless of the size or shape of the space.

Even small, simple changes—if made in the right places—can have a significant impact on your everyday life. That's we created this guide to show you how to make any space in your home more accessible, more functional, and more comfortable to live in with COPD.

We cover everything from how to arrange specific rooms to make household tasks less physically taxing to how you can use affordable gadgets and accessibility equipment to make everyday activities more convenient. No matter what kind of budget, time, or skill level you're working with, you can find an idea for something practical, simple, and meaningful you can do.

We'll also cover:

• How to spot problem areas and identify opportunities for improvement in your home
• How to organize your belongings for maximum efficiency and accessibility
• How to optimize your space to save energy and reduce breathlessness at home
• How to eliminate safety hazards and make it easier to move around your home
• How to choose furniture and appliances that require minimal effort and strain to use
• Inexpensive adaptive tools and gadgets to make everyday tasks easier to do with COPD.

Making Your Home a Refuge That Accommodates Your COPD Needs

Your home (or your private living space) is a special, sacred place, because it's one of the only environments you can adapt to fit your personal wants and needs. It's a place where you should feel capable, comfortable and safe—a refuge from the uncertainties of life and the expectations of the outside world.

Home is also where you should be able to live life the way you want to and do the things you love. It should empower you to be as independent as possible, and help you perform daily tasks in a way that's comfortable to you.

This is especially important if you COPD, which can have a significant impact on your mobility, endurance, and overall strength. Having a space that works with rather than against your physical limitations can make a radical difference in your daily life and your ability to live comfortably with COPD.

People with COPD often have special needs that others do not, such as the need to conserve energy, avoid lung irritants, or use supplemental oxygen during the day. These needs can significantly affect how you go about daily activities, but how much they limit your activities depends heavily on how well your living space is designed to accommodate those needs.

Because of this, people with COPD (and other chronic diseases) have more at stake—and more to consider—when arranging their living space. You not only have to think about what you need in the present, but also about how your physical needs abilities might change in the future; for example, when you have an exacerbation, or as your COPD progresses (causing further lung function decline).

Taking It Room by Room

Though we often think about our homes in abstract or aesthetic terms, at its core, a house is primarily a functional space. It's not just a place that you live in, it's a place made up of many distinct rooms and functional areas, each of which is designed for a specific purpose.

Because of this, each separate room or area in your home will have a different set of requirements for “optimal” design. That's why creating a luxurious home is all about creating optimized spaces, and why you have to consider each part of your living space as a separate part of the whole.

That's why, in this guide, we're going go through each room (or functional space) in the home one-by-one. This lets us focus on optimization with an emphasis on the kinds of tasks and activities that tend to be the most difficult for people with COPD.

In the following sections, you'll find a wide variety of tips, techniques, and ideas—both big and small—for how to make your home more comfortable, efficient, and COPD-friendly. Most of them utilize simple tools and straightforward techniques that anyone can pull off with minimal cost and difficulty.

We know that everyone has different preferences, abilities, and constraints to consider, so we did our best to include a little bit of something for everyone. And since each section in this guide addresses a different type of living area, you can easily skip around to find tips for whichever rooms you're most interested in.

Defining the Scope of Your Project

As you begin working on your home, it's important to remember your end goal and what you're really trying to achieve: greater comfort, accessibility, and convenience in your home. Otherwise, it's easy to get caught up in unimportant details or end up working on a totally different project than the one you set out to do.

It's also important to consider the specific parameters of your home improvement project. Everyone has time, budget, and resource limitations, and these limitations will help you determine the scope of what you can and can't do.

Of course, there are also physical limitations to consider, like the amount of space you have to work with and the floor plan of your home. While some people can afford to make extensive renovations or move to a more accessible home, many people can't, which is why the focus of this guide is how to do the best you can with the space you already have.

However, it's important to be realistic about the things you can and can't change or control in your home. Doing so will help you get the most out of your efforts by directing your energy and resources toward the the things that will make the most difference.

Still, limitations don't have to be the end-all-be-all, and you don't have to let them discourage you or stop you in your tracks. Even when you're faced with unchangeable circumstances, you might still be able to get at least some of what you want, even if you have to go about it in a different way.

For example, if you live in a multi-level home, you might not be able to change the fact that you have to go up and down stairs. However, you can make your stairs easier to navigate, or organize your home in such a way that you don't have use the stairs as often.

Whenever you run in to snags or difficulties, try to take a step back and consider different approaches. That's the best thing about taking the initiative to improve your space on your own; you can be as creative and unconventional as you want to be, as long as the end results work for you.

Things to Keep Mind For Any Space

Starting any kind of home improvement project can be a daunting task, but you don't have to jump into it blind. Knowing some basic home design principles and organizational techniques can help guide you through a wide range of different projects in every area of your home.

Here are some tips to help you help you get started—and stay focused—no matter what part of your home you're working to improve:

• Start by identifying problem areas, clutter, and sources of inconvenience or strain.
• Prioritize the areas that get the most use and matter most to you.
• Pay close attention to how each room's design and furniture layout affects how you use and navigate the space.
• Arrange each area to facilitate the activities you do most often, or the activities that you struggle with most because of your COPD
• Organize things by category and function so you don't have similar items spread out (and likely forgotten) between multiple rooms.
• Minimize clutter by making space to store all of your belongings; as the old saying goes, there should be “a place for everything, and everything in its place.”
• In general, stick with simple solutions; complex designs and intricate organizational systems are difficult to pull off.

While the rest of this guide focuses on room-specific strategies, we'll continue to discuss these and other general organizing principles throughout this guide. That's why we recommend reading through all of the following sections, even if you only plan to work on a certain part of your home; you might find an idea or find inspiration in one section that can be adapted to a variety of different rooms.

Improving Your Home for COPD Room by Room

The Bathroom

Let's start by talking about the bathroom, a unique space that serves as a multi-functional hub for a variety of different hygiene and grooming activities. The bathroom plays a huge role in most people's morning and evening routines, and can even be a place for relaxation and respite during the day.

Unfortunately, bathrooms can also be difficult spaces to navigate (and tolerate) if you have COPD.

First, bathrooms tend to be full of mobility barriers like tight spaces, slick surfaces, and tall tub sides. Second, bathrooms tend to have more air quality issues than other places in the home due to their propensity to collect mold, trap excess humidity, and accumulate noxious cleaning product fumes.

Luckily, there are many ways to make your bathroom more accessible and keep the air inside it fresh. Mostly, it comes down to establishing proper ventilation, practical organization, and outfitting your bathroom with a few key features to mitigate safety and mobility concerns.

Because everyone uses the bathroom so often, it's important to make it a place that feels comfortable, functional, and safe. With some work, you can even turn it into a place you want to spend time in, which can open up new opportunities for pampering and self care.

Organizing Your Bathroom for More Practical Use

Bathrooms, like most frequently-used spaces in the home, are prone to clutter and disorganization. It's easy to end up with crowded cabinets full of disorganized bath and skincare products while everyday toiletries and medicine bottles pile up on the counter top.

This is especially true for small bathrooms that have limited storage space. That's why, in most cases, organizing and paring down all your bathroom belongings is the best place to start.

First, get everything out of your cabinets, drawers, and all the other nooks and crannies in your bathroom. Then, sort those items by priority: what do you and others in your household use every day, versus every week, down to those that you very seldom (or not at all).

Next, it's time to pare things down. Consider what actually needs to be in the bathroom, what would be better stored elsewhere, and what you wouldn't mind getting rid of altogether.

If you've whittled it down to the essentials but you still don't have enough room to store everything neatly, you might need to expand your bathroom storage capacity. There are plenty of ways to do this without having to add any permanent cabinets or shelving; for example, you could use cabinet organizers, over-the-door storage devices, or small, stackable plastic storage containers

When you put all your belongings back, do it neatly and in order of importance, placing the most frequently-used items in the most convenient-to-reach places. This will ensure that you can access everyday items with the minimal amount of physical strain.

Make Your Shower a Safer and More Comfortable Place to Be

Showering is often a challenge for people with COPD, and many find it to be the most taxing part of their daily routine. When you combine the heat and humidity with physical strain of standing and washing, showering is a recipe for breathlessness if you don't have the right tools.

Luckily, you can make showering much more tolerable—and even pleasant—in just a few simple steps. First, you need to establish good ventilation in your bathroom, and then consider installing some basic (and relatively inexpensive) accessibility aids.

Proper Ventilation

Ventilating your bathroom sucks away excess heat and humidity, making it easier to breathe while you bathe. It also helps to get rid of stagnant humidity after you're out of the shower, reducing the risk that air-polluting mold will grow.

It's also important to ventilate the bathroom when you clean it to protect your lungs from the harmful fumes that many cleaning products generate. This is especially important for small, enclosed bathroom spaces that tend to trap and concentrate noxious fumes.

There are many different ways to ventilate your bathroom, and the easiest by far is by using a proper ventilation fan, the kind that's usually installed in the ceiling and turns on with a switch. Alternatively, you can open up the windows and doors attached to the bathroom and help the airflow along using one or more fans.

Equipment that can help you improve your bathroom ventilation:

• A well-functioning ventilation fan that vents outdoors
• A window fan that adjusts to fit snugly in your window frame
• A standing fan or table fan to blow air out the windows and/or doors

Safe & Comfy Floors

Drips and splashes are inevitable in the bathroom, which—unless your bathroom is carpeted—leads to damp, slick floors. This can be a very dangerous fall risk, not to mention an uncomfortable inconvenience when you step into a cold puddle on the floor.

That's why, if your bathroom has hard flooring, it's a good idea to place a non-slip bath mat near the shower and/or sink. Just make sure you choose a mat that's not too bulky (to reduce the risk of tripping over the edges) and has a sufficiently grippy rubber backing to hold it firmly in place on the floor.

That said, you should never use throw rugs or traditional bath mats (that don't have non-slip backings), as they can significantly increase your risk of trips and falls. In fact, studies show that poorly-secured bath mats are one of the biggest causes of fall injuries in the home.

In addition to the safety benefits, a non-slip bath mat is an extremely simple and affordable way to add an extra bit of luxury to your bathroom. Even though it's a simple comfort, having a soft, warm mat to greet you in when you step out of the shower, or when you make a bare-footed trip to the bathroom in the middle of the night, is something that you can enjoy and appreciate every day.

Shower Accessibility Tools

There are lots of different adaptive aids and equipment to help in the bathroom, and most are designed to make the bath and shower easier to use. They include shower chairs, handles, and bars to provide extra stability, as well as equipment that makes it easier to wash yourself when you bathe.

Here is a list of some of the most common and practical shower accessibility tools:

• In-shower handles and bars: these make it easier to stabilize yourself in the shower and reduces the risk of falling when you get in and out of the tub (avoid handles that use suction cups or other insecure methods of attaching to the wall).
• In-tub non-slip mat: this can help you get extra grip on the floor in the bathtub while providing a softer, more comfortable surface for your feet.
• Shower chair: this allows you sit while you shower, which not only helps you save energy (which reduces breathlessness), but also significantly reduces your risk of slipping on the slick floor.
• Removable, Hand-Held Shower Head: this type of shower head gives you full control over the water angle and flow, a must-have if you shower sitting down in a shower chair.
• Long-handled scrub brush: this can help you reach all areas of your body without having to strain or contort yourself.
• Tub Transfer Bench: this is a simple seat that forms a bridge over the edge of the tub so that you can easily sit and slide yourself over to get into the tub.
• Raised toilet seat or toilet safety frame: either or both of these are great solutions for those who struggle to get up and down from a sitting position, or get breathless doing so because of their COPD.

Addressing Mold and Other Air Quality Problems

There are a number of causes of air quality problems in the bathroom, the main culprits being mold, strongly-scented products, and noxious cleaning fumes. Mold tends to be the most dangerous because it can hide in unseen places and continually release toxic spores that can damage your lungs.

It's important to check your bathroom for mold regularly, keeping an eye out for black spots or a musty, moldy smell. If you find mold, get it cleaned up immediately to prevent it from spreading or causing structural damage to floors, ceilings, and walls.

In most situations, it's best to let someone else do the cleaning; messing with mold tends to stir up the spores, which can be dangerous for sensitive lungs. Consider asking a friend or family member to help you take care of minor mold problems or hire a professional for bigger jobs.

You should also pay attention to what kinds of products you (and others in your household) use; do any of them make you cough, feel breathless, or otherwise irritate your lungs? Strong fragrances are a common COPD trigger, and many people find it easier to breathe when they use unscented and fragrance-free products in their home.

If your lungs are scent-sensitive, you should also avoid using air fresheners and aerosol spray products, especially in an enclosed bathroom space. You should also avoid using noxious cleaning products (opting instead for lung-safe alternatives) and make sure to let the bathroom air out after it's cleaned.

The Bedroom

While the bedroom might not seem like a top-priority place for a re-design, your bedroom is actually one of the more important environments in the home. Your bedroom not only sets the stage for how you start and end your day, but it also plays a major role in your ability to get a good night's sleep.

This is especially important for people with COPD, who often experience difficulty getting to sleep and staying asleep at night. And while changing up your bedroom won't solve all of your sleeping problems, it can help you control certain COPD triggers and create an environment that's more conducive to sleep.

To do this, you need to consider ambient factors, like temperature and noise control, in addition to tangible factors like bedding, furniture layout, and décor. You might be surprised at how much a bit of optimization in the bedroom can improve your sleep and quality of life.

Making Your Bed More COPD-Friendly

If you're going to optimize anything in your bedroom, your actual bed is probably the best place to start. It's centerpiece of every bedroom and, arguably, the most important piece of furniture you own, since you spend hours lying in bed every single night.

Making your bed more comfortable starts with the mattress and bedding, both of which should be comfortable and suited to your temperature needs. If you tend to get hot at night, for example, you might want to avoid memory foam mattresses and thermal bedding that are more likely to make you overheat.

You should also make sure to wash your sheets and blankets often to get rid of dust, allergens, and other irritants that can accumulate in your bedding and aggravate your COPD. This is especially important if your lungs are very sensitive or you notice your COPD symptoms getting worse after you go to bed.

It's also important to have the right tools for good sleep posture, which often means having some extra pillows for support. Whether you prefer to lay on your back, side, or stomach, some extra cushioning in the right places can help you sleep more comfortably and keep your spine aligned correctly while you sleep.

Some experts suggest that sleeping on

Pneumonia is a somewhat common and potentially serious type of lung infection that, on average, causes more than a quarter of a million hospitalizations and about 50,000 deaths in the US every year. Anyone can get pneumonia, but it's significantly more dangerous for older adults and people with chronic lung diseases like COPD.

Pneumonia has long been a major health concern for people in these vulnerable groups, and especially for people with COPD, who are both more prone to getting pneumonia and more prone to suffering severe complications from the disease. However, most people know very little about how pneumonia infections work and how they're caused.

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Many people don't realize that there are dozens of different types of viruses, bacteria, and fungi that can cause pneumonia; in fact, there are more than thirty different types of pneumonia-causing bacteria alone. Some are more dangerous and more difficult to treat than others, and they also vary in how often and how severely—they affect people with COPD.

In this guide, we're going to take a closer look at the eight main types of pneumonia and what their different characteristics mean for people with COPD. We'll discuss which types of pneumonia people with COPD are most likely to get, which ones are most likely to cause COPD complications, and what people with COPD can do to protect themselves from different kinds of pneumonia.

We'll also answer some important questions about pneumonia and COPD, including:

• How is pneumonia treated in COPD patients, and how long does it take to recover?
• Why does pneumonia often occur during COPD exacerbations?
• What can I do to avoid getting a secondary pneumonia infection?

Our goal is to give people with COPD all the knowledge they need to understand, recognize, and protect themselves from pneumonia in all of its different forms. However, if you're only interested in learning about the different types of pneumonia infections and would like to skip ahead, you can jump straight to that section by clicking here.

How Pneumonia Works: Causes, Symptoms, Complications & Recovery

We'll start by reviewing some of the basic characteristics of pneumonia and why it poses such a serious threat to people with COPD. Next, we'll examine each of the eight major types of pneumonia one by one to see how their causes, symptoms, treatments, and general threat levels differ, as well as what kind of risk they tend to pose to people with chronic lung diseases.

At the end of this guide, we've included a few helpful tips for preventing pneumonia infections and keeping your lungs as germ- and disease-free as possible. You'll find additional tips for managing respiratory infections sprinkled throughout this guide, as well as links to expert online resources where you can learn more.

What is Pneumonia?

In the simplest terms, pneumonia is a type of lung infection that causes inflammation in the tiny air sacs, called alveoli, inside one or both of the lungs. This inflammation causes fluid (specifically pus) to build up inside the alveoli, which impairs their ability to function and reduces how much oxygen the lungs can absorb.

Pneumonia can arise from a variety of different illnesses, including the common cold, the flu, and many different types of bacteria. The term pneumonia refers specifically to the inflammation that causes the air sacs to fill up with fluid, and not necessarily to the illness that caused the inflammation in the first place.

For example, most people who get the flu don't get pneumonia, but some people get so sick with the flu that it causes a pneumonia infection. In this way, pneumonia is less like a single disease in the way we often think of them, and more like a specific type of inflammatory response that causes a specific set of respiratory symptoms.

How do You Get Pneumonia?

There are three main types of pathogens that can cause pneumonia infections: viruses, bacteria, and fungi. Your lungs are constantly bombarded with these pathogens when you breathe and sometimes when you aspirate food or fluid into your lungs.

Every person also has a certain amount of bacteria (often including pneumonia bacteria) living in their lungs all the time. While this might sound dangerous, these bacteria don't cause problems most of the time because the lungs are pretty good at fighting off infection and keeping resident bacteria under control.

However, sometimes pneumonia-causing bacteria are able to break through the lungs defenses and cause infection. This is most likely to happen when the lungs are already weakened by another illness, which is why bacterial pneumonia often strikes people who are already sick.

When this happens, pneumonia is known as a “secondary infection” because it's a secondary consequence of a different infection that came before. In these cases, the bacteria likely would not have been able to cause a pneumonia infection if the lungs hadn't already been compromised by another illness first.

Viral pneumonia, on the other hand, is not caused by bacteria, but rather by respiratory viruses like the flu, the common cold, or even COVID-19. These viruses inflame the lungs and can sometimes result in pneumonia if the infection becomes severe enough to cause fluid build-up in the lungs.

However, as we already mentioned, respiratory viruses can also create conditions that allow bacteria to multiply in the lungs. Thus, viral illnesses can cause pneumonia in two different ways: by directly inflaming the air sacs in the lungs (viral pneumonia), or by causing a secondary bacterial infection in the lungs (bacterial pneumonia).

Pneumonia infections can also happen on their own to anyone, even without any prior illness or health condition to pave the way. You can get bacterial pneumonia spontaneously, from your own lungs, or get viral pneumonia from other people in your home, your community, or in the hospital.

Why Do People With COPD Have a Higher-than-Average Risk for Lung Infections?

Healthy lungs are equipped with a variety of defenses that, in healthy lungs, are good at destroying and removing invading pathogens to prevent infection. Unfortunately, inflammation, lung damage, and airway damage caused by COPD severely impairs these germ-fighting defenses over time.

This causes people with COPD to be more prone to getting pneumonia, and more prone to severe pneumonia infections than those without COPD. Many COPD patients also use inhaled or oral steroid medications to manage their symptoms, which also increases the risk for pneumonia.

What is The Risk for Pneumonia Among People with COPD?

Research shows that having COPD significantly elevates your risk of getting pneumonia. Though it's hard to get an exact number, research suggests that older adults with COPD are at least four to six times as likely to get pneumonia compared to adults without COPD.

One study found that COPD patients were sixteen times more likely than non-COPD patients to get pneumonia in the first year after COPD diagnosis. Other factors, when combined with COPD, increase your risk for pneumonia even more, such as:

• Smoking (especially heavy smoking)
• Heavy drinking
• Older age (especially being over the age of 65)
• Very young age (especially being under the age of 2)
• Low BMI
• Having a chronic illness, including diabetes and heart disease
• Having a lung disease, including asthma, COPD, cystic fibrosis, or lung cancer
• Having a weakened or compromised immune system

What are the Symptoms of Pneumonia?

The hallmark symptoms of pneumonia are respiratory symptoms like coughing, difficulty breathing, and shortness of breath. They can vary from very mild (e.g. feeling winded more easily) to very serious (e.g. struggling to breathe while resting).

In serious cases, people with pneumonia can have such severe breathing problems that they are unable to get enough oxygen on their own. Because of this, severe pneumonia infections often require hospitalization and breathing assistance via supplemental oxygen or mechanical ventilation.

On the other hand, mild cases of pneumonia usually only cause slight breathing problems if they cause any noticeable breathing symptoms at all. Instead, minor pneumonia infections tend to cause the kinds of symptoms that most people associate with the flu: fever, chills, coughing, and a general feeling of malaise.

How severe a pneumonia infection gets depends on several factors, including:

• What caused the infection
• The age of the person infected
• Whether or not the patient has existing health problems

For example, you're more likely to get severe pneumonia if you are an older adult and if you have an existing respiratory condition like asthma or COPD. The type of pneumonia also matters; in general, viral pneumonia tends to cause milder symptoms than bacterial pneumonia, and it's often easier to treat.

Mild pneumonia infections often go away on their own or can be cured with a simple course of antibiotics. However, people who have health problems (like COPD) that make them vulnerable to infection should always seek treatment for suspected pneumonia symptoms no matter how mild they are.

Here is a list of some of the most common pneumonia symptoms:

• Fever
• Chills
• Coughing (especially coughing up phlegm)
• Feeling tired, weak, or fatigued
• Shortness of breath
• Fast, shallow breathing
• Chest pain (especially when breathing or coughing)
• Low body temperature (most common in older adults and people with compromised immune systems)
• Confusion (usually in older adults)
• Diarrhea
• Nausea
• Vomiting

Possible Health Complications from Pneumonia

In addition to the symptoms we discussed in the previous section, pneumonia can serious health and breathing complications like respiratory failure and septic shock. People with severe pneumonia infections have a higher risk for these complications, as do older adults and people with weakened immune systems or chronic lung diseases (including asthma and COPD).

Here is a list of some of the major health complications that you can get from pneumonia:

• Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome (ARDS): This is a severe breathing disorder caused by poor gas exchange in the lungs. Symptoms include low blood pressure, rapid, labored breathing and severe shortness of breath (it can also lead to respiratory failure)
• Acute Respiratory Failure (ARF): This condition is a medical emergency that occurs when your lung function becomes so poor that your body can no longer breathe adequately on its own. The symptoms of ARF are similar to acute respiratory distress, but may be more severe and include signs of low blood oxygen levels (e.g. a bluish tint to the skin, especially fingertips, toes, and lips).
• Pleural Disorders: Pleural disorders are caused by inflammation in the lungs' outer tissue, known as the pleura. Some pleural disorders are relatively harmless and only cause a sharp pain when breathing, while others, like a collapsed lung, are more serious. More serious pleural disorders can cause gas, fluid, or blood to build up in the space around the lungs.
• Kidney, liver, and ear damage: This can happen if the body is starved of oxygen long enough to cause organ damage. It can also happen from if bacteria causing a pneumonia infection spreads to another organ.
• Necrotizing Pneumonia: This happens when infected lung tissue dies and causes an abscess. This is a life-threatening condition that often requires surgery to remove the dead tissue.
• Sepsis: This is a life-threatening blood infection that can occur if bacterial pneumonia spreads from the lungs into the bloodstream. Sepsis is a medical emergency that requires immediate, intensive treatment.
• Death: often the result of respiratory failure or another severe pneumonia complications.

Signs of Pneumonia with COPD

Many pneumonia symptoms overlap or are similar to symptoms of COPD, which can make it difficult for COPD patients to recognize when they have a pneumonia infection. In many cases, the first sign of pneumonia is a flare-up in existing COPD symptoms, sometimes accompanied by a fever and changes in the color, amount, or consistency of the mucus you cough up.

Some studies have found that certain symptoms in COPD patients are more likely to indicate pneumonia than others, including:

• Body chills
• Sputum purulence: this refers to any significant changes in your mucus that could indicate infection, such as producing more mucus than usual, having thicker mucus than usual, or having mucus that is yellow or green in color.
• Pleural pain (pleurisy): this refers to a specific type of sharp pain that gets worse when you breathe; it's caused by inflammation in the tissue (pleura) that surrounds the lungs.

Without medical imaging, however, it can be difficult or impossible to tell whether these symptoms are caused by pneumonia or another type of COPD exacerbation.

Strangely enough, the initial symptoms of pneumonia tend to be milder in people who are more vulnerable to pneumonia because of their age or existing health problems like COPD. People in these at-risk groups tend to have weakened immune systems that don't respond quite as violently to the infection as stronger immune systems do.

As a result, people in high-risk groups don't get high fevers as often—and sometimes even experience a drop in body temperature—when they get pneumonia. However, none of this means that pneumonia is any less dangerous for these groups.

In fact, a weakened immune response makes it even more difficult for your body to fight pneumonia, which can make the infection last longer and become more severe. This can result in longer hospital recovery times and an increased risk for pneumonia complications and and increased risk of dying from the disease.

People with COPD can develop very severe breathing symptoms as the infection goes on, and many require intensive treatment. That's why, if you have COPD, you should always be on the lookout for new or worsened breathing symptoms that could signal a pneumonia infection or a COPD exacerbation.

If you do notice pneumonia symptoms or experience a symptom flare-up that doesn't quickly go away on its own, you should seek treatment right away. The longer you go without treatment, the more severe your pneumonia can become, and the more likely you are to get severely ill.

Extra Pneumonia Risks Associated with COPD

Studies show that people with existing lung problems like COPD tend to have more severe breathing problems and more pneumonia complications than healthy adults. That's because the detrimental effects that pneumonia has on the lungs stack onto the existing lung problems that people with COPD and other lung diseases already have.

For example, lungs affected by COPD have damaged air sacs that are unable to absorb oxygen as efficiently as they should. Pneumonia infections cause these already-impaired air sacs to fill up with fluid, which makes it even harder for them to function and absorb adequate amounts of oxygen.

When the lungs are already weakened by COPD, that could be all the pressure it takes to push the lungs below the threshold where they can no longer function well enough to keep up with the body's oxygen needs. When this happens, blood oxygen levels drop, and COPD patients who already struggle with low oxygen levels may be more likely to experience serious complications as a result.

These complications include unhealthily-low blood oxygen levels (hypoxemia) and severe breathing symptoms (like shortness of breath) that result from that hypoxemia. It can also cause a more serious condition known as hypoxia, a life-threatening condition that happens when the body's vital organs are starved of oxygen, which can lead to organ failure and death without proper treatment.

People with COPD are also more prone to respiratory failure when they have pneumonia. Respiratory failure happens when your lung function becomes so poor that the whole process of gas exchange in the lungs breaks down, causing a severe imbalance of oxygen and/or carbon dioxide in the blood that can quickly be fatal and requires emergency medical care.

All of these problems are reflected in research that shows COPD patients tend to get more severe pneumonia infections and are more likely to need intensive hospital care. Other studies show that COPD patients with also have higher rates of hospitalization, mechanical ventilation, and death associated with pneumonia compared to patients without chronic lung disease.

People with COPD are also more likely to experience long-term or permanent lung function loss from pneumonia because their lungs are especially prone to scarring and other damage from infection. As a result, some COPD patients have worse COPD symptoms and lower baseline lung function after recovering from pneumonia compared to before they got sick.

In severe cases, pneumonia can cause life-threatening symptoms that require emergency medical care. If you experience any of the symptoms in the following list, you should call 911 immediately or get to the closest emergency room right away.

Symptoms of a Medical Emergency:

• Shortness of breath during rest, or shortness of breath that doesn't improve with rest
• Rapid breathing that doesn't improve with rest
• Severe dizziness
• Confusion
• Coughing up blood
• Persistent, high fever
• Persistent vomiting
• A bluish tint to your fingernails, toes, or lips
• Severe headache
• Chest pain that's new, severe, or doesn't have a known, non-emergency cause

Certain COPD Medications Increase Your Risk for Pneumonia

Both inhaled corticosteroids (for daily COPD maintenance) and oral corticosteroid pills (to aid recovery from COPD exacerbations) are common in COPD treatment. Unfortunately, research shows that some people with COPD may also have an increased risk for pneumonia infections specifically because they use corticosteroid medications.

Pneumonia and COPD Exacerbations

COPD exacerbations are temporary (days or weeks-long) episodes in which a person's COPD symptoms get noticeably worse. Many exacerbations require additional treatment or even hospitalization, and severe exacerbations can cause irreparable lung damage that permanently worsens COPD symptoms.

Most COPD exacerbations occur when a person with COPD gets sic