If there is one thing patients do not need is more bad news about COPD. The following revelation about how tobacco smoking damages the lungs and leads to significant debility is a double-edged sword while it provides new information about how the lungs are damaged it also points to a possible new therapeutic target for some COPD patients.
The new observation is that the lung tissue and the vascular supply of the lungs are damaged independently of one another and that some patients with COPD are short of breath more because of there vascular lung disease than the tissue impairment. Patients with COPD who do not have problems with their oxygen levels and do not have elevations of the pressure in the arteries in their lungs may have impairment of the small blood vessels in the lungs regardless of the severity of their lung disease.
What does this mean and how does this knowledge help some COPD patients? It means that some patients may be helped by medications that dilate the blood vessels of their lungs. A treatment which up until now has been thought and had been demonstrated to be harmful. It was shown in the past that some patients with COPD did poorly and in some cases suffered significant consequences from taking vasodilator drugs.
I predict that these new findings will lead to a better approach to the evaluation of COPD patients and new treatment regimes that may help with symptoms and survival. Stay tuned.
