How to reduce your risk of COPD

Reducing Your Risk of COPD

You can prevent chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) or reduce your risk of suffering from its symptoms. While Your doctor can manage chronic inflammatory lung disease symptoms with medications, such as Spiriva, these can reduce your quality of life. Indeed, the more proactive you mitigate your risks, the more likely you will not suffer from its symptoms.

There are many ways to reduce your COPD risk to reduce its symptoms’ severity, frequency, and duration.

Stop Smoking

People exposed to tobacco smoke, either as smokers or secondhand smoke, are more likely to develop COPD. The more packs you smoke, and the years you have been a smoker, the higher your disease risks. Thus, your first step is to stop smoking cigarettes!

But it’s not just cigarettes that you should stop smoking, either. Studies have shown that cigar smokers, pipe smokers, and marijuana smokers are also at risk.

Even when you don’t smoke directly, prolonged exposure to secondhand smoke can make you a likely candidate for the disease. Therefore, it would be best if you then avoided such exposure.

If you have asthma, you have another reason to stop smoking to reduce your risk of COPD. You’re already experiencing health issues, as with chronic inflammatory airway disease. Smoking triggers it, so there’s no sense in adding to your woes.

How to deal with COPD

The following table lists a few things you’ll have to purchase to deal with COPD once it develops.

Decrease Your Exposure to Certain Things

People with long-term exposure to chemical fumes, dust, and environmental vapors, especially in the workplace, also have COPD. These things irritate the lungs, resulting in chronic inflammation that, in turn, can lead to the disease. The symptoms will worsen even with medications because the root cause remains.

These two risk factors are within your control. With or without nicotine patches and the like, you can stop smoking and significantly decrease your exposure to secondhand smoke. You can also adopt safety measures to reduce exposure to fumes, dust, and vapors in your workplace, home, and the environment, such as wearing dust masks.

These steps are necessary since there are factors that you cannot control, such as age and genetics. The more you take control of your health, the less you will feel helpless in the face of modern man’s diseases.

Further reading: Learn more about COPD, its causes, and the different stages of the condition.