Dr. Javier Perez-Fernandez, Critical Care and Pulmonary Medicine Physician with Baptist Hospital and West Kendall Baptist Hospital, explains Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) affects the lungs and breathing. “People with COPD have difficulty breathing. It is not a hereditary disease, it is an acquired disease that happens at adult age.”
He also points out it is treatable and it is classified as emphysema or chronic bronchitis. Both of them have the same prognosis and treatment, but they affect the lungs in different ways.
Transcript
Let’s start with what is COPD well COPD is a very extense disease is called COPD it summarizes chronic obstructive pulmonary disease traffic these are lungs so affects the breathing of the people, so people with COPD have difficulty breathing, it is not an hereditary disease is an acquired disease that means happens at adult age and it’s because one of the consequences of things that we do in normal life and we’ll talk about it.> Now tell me about your job and working with COPD patients what do you do?.> As a pulmonologist we are typically seeing patients with COPD now I have to also summarize a little bit about the COPD because some people have heard the word emphysema that represents COPD and we’ll talk about the classification but essentially what we do is take care of patients with the disease, help them to learn how to cope with circumstances that affect in on and daily life, and also treat the disease which is very important as you mentioned is treatable.> And now let’s see how do you classify COPD?.> Well it’s typically classified as I mentioned in the form of emphysema or chronic bronchitis, and they both kind of synonymous, synonymous in the sense that they’re both portraying the same protein gnosis the same treatment but there’s differences on the way COPD affects the lungs for people with emphysema or chronic bronchitis, we actually classify this disease based on severity, there’s people are mild, moderate, severe, or very severe, and that’s the way we have classified lately and that represents also the way we treat those people.
