How to treat COPD patients?

For a long time, people believe that oxygen therapy is an effective method for severe patients, especially for patients with the chronic obstructive pulmonary disease with severe symptoms of hypoxia, which can play an effective role in relieving the patients' life-threatening lethargy. Once things get better, people take it for granted that they don't need to inhale oxygen anymore, and It is worry whether Long-term oxygen inhalation will make people become addicted and be harmful.

In fact, these opinions are caused by the lack of sufficient understanding of oxygen therapy. The need for long-term oxygen inhalation is not due to dependence and addiction to oxygen, but precisely because of chronic hypoxia in the body. Patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease suffer from severe hypoxia for a long time, and are prone to symptoms such as shortness of breath, fatigue, memory loss, and even cyanosis of the lips, fingers, and toenails, and even cause dysfunction and damage to the brain, heart, liver, and kidneys. The more severe the hypoxia, the earlier the occurrence of cor pulmonary. In addition, long-term hypoxia can also affect the body's immune defense function, so it is prone to repeated respiratory infections.

The doctor recommends that some patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease need to continue long-term home oxygen therapy after their acute illness is controlled. The correct oxygen therapy can delay the progression of the disease, reduce respiratory infections, and improve the patient's quality of life.

The goal of long-term home oxygen therapy is to prevent severe hypoxia during rest, sleep and activities in patients with COPD through oxygen therapy, and eliminate the adverse effects of chronic hypoxia on health, such as correcting hypoxaemia and reducing pulmonary arteries. Compression and delay the progression of pulmonary heart disease, etc., can ultimately prolong the survival time of patients and improve the quality of life.

Of course, not all patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary obstruction should be treated with long-term oxygen therapy. The clinical practice is mainly for patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease who have the following indications: after smoking cessation, medication and other treatments are stable, the patient still has arterial hypoxaemia at rest That is, when breathing indoor air, its arterial blood oxygen partial pressure is less than or equal to 55mmHg. If the partial pressure of blood oxygen is 55-59mmHg, the following conditions should also be inhaled, such as secondary hypoglycemia; pulmonary hypertension; right heart failure.

Patients with COPD should strengthen their own functional exercises. Although these patients often have a certain degree of breathing difficulties, they cannot stop exercising. Appropriate rehabilitation training is very helpful to the stability of the disease. This emphasizes the need to breathe Find a balance between difficulty and exercise intensity. Of course, there are also some more scientific evaluation methods, such as exercise cardiopulmonary function to evaluate the patient's exercise ability, and formulate corresponding exercise prescriptions accordingly. For patients taking oxygen, rehabilitation exercises should be performed under oxygen inhalation.

Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease is a common and frequently-occurring disease in the respiratory system of the elderly, especially in winter when the climate changes drastically and the temperature drops sharply. Therefore, once diagnosed with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, you must seek medical treatment in time and adopt professional and standardized treatment methods. COPD patients insist on daily home oxygen therapy for at least 7-8 hours a day, with a 5-liter oxygen concentrators as the mainstay, and must be equipped with oxygen concentration detection and temperature detection.

Home oxygen therapy:

How many liters of oxygen concentrators do patients with COPD need?

Family oxygen therapy requires a 3--10 liter oxygen concentrator (depending on the condition). According to the relationship between the inhaled oxygen concentration and the flow rate, only 41% of the oxygen in the patient's body can be inhaled by the 5-liter oxygen concentrator. This is the value under ideal conditions. In fact, the oxygen inhaled by the 5-liter machine in patients with COPD is more than 30%. , That is, the doctor said that oxygen with a low oxygen concentration of about 30 should be used for discharge. This refers to a 5 liter oxygen generator. Whether the patient uses 3 liters, 5 liters or 10 liters, it depends on the patient’s blood oxygen saturation above 90% (Generally 94% is sufficient) as the target. For example, for patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease who use a 5-liter machine but the blood oxygen saturation is below 90%, a large-flow oxygen concentrator above 5 liters should be used. Oxygen therapy time: ranging from 7-8 hours a day to more than ten hours, very serious more than 20 hours.