COPD: exercise pays off
Christiane Fux studied journalism and psychology in Hamburg. The experienced medical editor has been writing magazine articles, news and factual texts on all conceivable health topics since 2001. In addition to her work for, Christiane Fux is also active in prose. Her first crime novel was published in 2012, and she also writes, designs and publishes her own crime plays.
More posts by Christiane Fux All content is checked by medical journalists.People with COPD run out of air little by little. One of the most important countermeasures is exercise. How well it works is also shown by the fact that acute crises, during which shortness of breath and physical condition deteriorate drastically, occur much less frequently in physically active patients.
Such sudden worsening (exacerbations) are a major reason for people with COPD to be hospitalized. They are not only feared because the COPD symptoms worsen dramatically in a very short time. Often times, patients do not fully recover from an exacerbation. Lung function and health status will then remain permanently worse than before.
Fewer hospital days
Regular physical activity can protect against this. For example, COPD patients ended up in hospital significantly less often after pneumological rehabilitation if they had exercised regularly after the measure. This was the result of an investigation carried out by Dr. Danijel Jelusic (Bad Reichenhall) and presented it in the Ärztezeitung. 370 COPD patients were surveyed immediately after a three-week inpatient rehabilitation stay and again one year later. Participants who had exercised at least twice a week only had to spend an average of one instead of two days in the hospital the following year.
The previous rehab also had a clear effect: It reduced the number of hospital days from an average of 5.1 per year to 1.5. Physical training may also have played a central role in this. It is a central element of pneumological rehabilitation for people with COPD.
Dwindling muscle mass, increased shortness of breath
Lack of exercise is a major problem with COPD. The increasing shortness of breath causes the patient to be less and less active. But then muscle mass disappears - including those that could support the restricted lung function. As a result, breathing becomes even more difficult and the patient moves even less - a vicious circle. In addition: the less a patient is physically active, the more likely the exacerbations will occur. Doctors suggest that exercise may reduce inflammation in the lungs. However, this has not yet been proven.
The "chronic obstructive pulmonary disease" COPD is popularly played down as "smoker's lung" or "smoker's cough". In fact, however, COPD is a life-threatening disease which, in its advanced stages, is associated with a considerable loss of quality of life. The main cause of COPD in Germany is smoking. Of those smokers who have been using cigarettes for 20 years, 15 to 20 percent develop COPD. Experts estimate that ten to twelve percent of people over 40 in Germany suffer from it. However, the high number of unreported cases makes more precise information difficult.
Sources:
Danijel Jelusic: More sport after rehab, fewer days in hospital, Ärztezeitung, 03.03.2016
Pulmonologist on the net, www.lungenaerzte-im-netz.de, Accessed March 9, 2016
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