Patients who got Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (called COPD) are susceptible to long-term hypoxia thanks to various reasons. Hypoxia can cause varying degrees of harm to the body, including increased pulmonary vascular resistance, pulmonary hypertension, chronic hypertrophy, coronary failure, red blood cells, increased blood viscosity and malnutrition.

These harms will aggravate the patient's condition, cause a rise within the number of hospitalizations, and a decrease within the quality of life and survival rate. Therefore, oxygen therapy plays a really important role in patients with COPD, but in practical applications, many of us have a spread of adverse reactions and harms thanks to insufficient knowledge or misunderstandings, resulting in excessive oxygen therapy, but they often don't realize it.

So, the way to prevent the exacerbation of COPD? we will concentrate to the subsequent aspects:

Environment

Patients with COPD must have a clean-air living environment. they need to do an honest job of protection to avoid the impact of irritating and harmful gases, like dust on the systema respiratorium. And it’s better to enforce breathing fresh air a day.

Habit

Maintain a daily lifestyle. consistent with the fitness, enforce proper exercise, get more sunshine. Please keep consider prevent colds, flu, bronchitis and infectious diseases.

Note

Patients with COPD should ban smoking and alcohol. Long-term heavy smoking can cause carcinoma and obstructive emphysema; alcoholism can cause gastrointestinal system and cardiovascular and cerebrovascular diseases, and it also features a serious impact on the systema respiratorium.

Oxygen therapy

Long-term home oxygen therapy can delay the further development of the disease, reduce respiratory infections, and improve the standard of lifetime of patients.

The goal of long-term home oxygen therapy is to stop COPD patients from experiencing severe hypoxia during rest, sleep, and activities through oxygen therapy, and eliminate the adverse effects of chronic hypoxia on health.

Treatment

Standardized treatment is extremely important. Patients with COPD should still take stable-phase drugs for maintenance treatment to enhance lung function, improve quality of life and stop infection. If symptoms worsen, they ought to attend the hospital early for treatment.

The method of home oxygen therapy:

Oxygen concentrator: Using power supply device, make the air through the molecular sieve to separate oxygen, nitrogen and other inert gases. within the range of 1-10 liters/min oxygen flow, different purity of oxygen is often provided. it's convenient to use indoors without regular replacement, and is suitable for long-term oxygen therapy reception.

Oxygen inhalation method: double-cavity nasal catheter oxygen method, nasal congestion oxygen method, mask oxygen method.

The oxygen supply equipment used varies from person to person, but the quantity of oxygen is that the same. That is, when beginning to inhale oxygen, the doctor should determine the quantity of inhaled oxygen consistent with the condition, and strive to use the smallest amount flow of oxygen to realize the best effect. Usually start with a coffee flow, adjust the oxygen flow to about 1-3 liters/min, and increase the flow appropriately during sleep. Oxygen therapy should last about 15 hours each day.

In short, long-term home oxygen therapy is extremely practical for COPD patients. It should be administered under the guidance of a specialist for the primary time, adjust the acceptable oxygen flow, keep the oxygen humidification and therefore the humidification bottle clean. At an equivalent time, it's necessary to stick to the treatment and persevere so as to realize the specified effect.