The Efficacy of non-invasive ventilation in the acute exacerbation of COPD Patient - Research Paper Example

Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease best known as COPD, is actually a group of lung diseases that together block airflow to the lungs making it hard to breathe. The two most common diseases that constitute this disease are chronic bronchitis, inflammation of the bronchial tract mucosal lining, and emphysema, gradual destruction of the alveoli at the end of the bronchioles (Huang and Ghio et al., 2012). These may also be accompanied by asthma. Chronic bronchitis causes coughing and sputum production, which may scar and damage the airways.

Alveoli damage by emphysema reduce oxygen uptake thus causing breathing problems for the patient. The combination of the destruction these two diseases cause irreversible damage to the pulmonary system, but the good thing is that there is treatment available that can help reduce the symptoms of the disease. One of them is through non invasive ventilation, otherwise known as NIV in short. This paper will be looking at this form of therapy and its efficiency in the treatment of COPD. It will discuss its use and advantages it the clinical setting.

Being a pulmonary disease, its symptoms are generally ignored or just taken in passing for something else. COPD can cause breathlessness/dyspnea, coughing, excessive production of mucus/phlegm and fatigue. Some of these symptoms, breathlessness and fatigue, are hard to point out or see because they are sensations that are experienced by the patient and do not manifest physically (Barnes, 2009). Only the person experiencing the symptom can describe them and talk about how badly they make them feel as opposed to the production of sputum and coughing which manifest physically.

Unfortunately, once these symptoms, among others begin to manifest the patient may discard them as simply smoker’s cough or fatigue from being unfit. These are to be considered as signs