COPD News & Features

Studies show marijuana can open up your airways. But can inhaling cannabis help or hurt a smoking-related lung condition like COPD?

There’s no one-size-fits-all answer when it comes to predicting someone’s life span with COPD. A lot depends on your age, health, lifestyle, and how severe the disease was when you were diagnosed, plus the steps you've taken to lessen the damage afterward.

If you’re living with COPD, you may have already made some lifestyle changes to stay healthy and make it less likely that your condition will get worse, which is great. And you might wonder if alcohol could prevent, improve, or make COPD worse. Here’s what the science says about drinking alcohol when you have COPD.

COPD not only makes you feel breathless, it can also make you feel isolated, depressed, and stressed. When you connect with a community of other people who have COPD, you’ll get support, management tips, and advice on how to improve your symptoms and feel better. Learn how to find a COPD community online to get help.

COPD is a lifelong condition that can make breathing difficult and interrupt daily activities. Playing the harmonica might hold the key to ease and improve breathing.

Many homes harbor dust, fumes, germs, and other irritants that aggravate COPD symptoms like wheezing, coughing, shortness of breath, and chest tightness.

WebMD article on smoking cessation for people who have COPD.

COPD makes it hard to breathe. Can CBD help people with this condition?

If you have COPD, is it OK to drink alcohol, or should you go cold turkey? And is there a link between drinking and developing COPD?

If you have or are at risk for a lung condition such as COPD, you may have heard about ways people try to “detox” their lungs. Here’s what you should know first.

Symptoms for women with COPD may be worse than for men with the same level of disease, and periods of worse symptoms may be more frequent, lead researcher Dr. Allison Lambert says.

Many Americans take a daily low-dose aspirin to protect their hearts. Now it appears aspirin may also reduce flare-ups of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD).

Researchers are looking for new ways to treat chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). Here’s a look at what’s on the horizon.

Find out how your doctor will decide the best course of action to ease your COPD symptoms.

The plaintiffs say the EPA had committed to banning methylene chloride from products sold in the United States but has failed to follow through. Federal law allows the public to sue the agency to force it to act.

Taking vitamin D supplements was associated with a 45 percent reduction in lung attacks among patients who were deficient in vitamin D, but there was no reduction among patients with higher vitamin D levels, the investigators found.

After checking their flu vaccination status, investigators found that people with COPD who had a flu shot were 38 percent less likely to be hospitalized for flu-related illness.

Sarcoidosis is an inflammatory disease that affects multiple organs. While some patients recover without treatment, others suffer damage to lungs, heart, lymph nodes, skin and other organs. On the skin, it can cause disfiguring lesions.

COPD, which is often linked to smoking, is a progressive deterioration of lung function that involves a combination of bronchitis and emphysema symptoms.

The vapor from e-cigarettes was much more harmful than e-cigarette fluid to lung cells -- and the more the cells were exposed to it, the more they were damaged, scientists report in a new study.

More than 4 in 10 women with asthma developed chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), and heavy smoking and obesity were among the significant risk factors, a new study found.

The findings suggest that breathing toxic dust, even tiny amounts, could pose a health peril to future astronauts traveling to airless planets, according to the researchers from Stony Brook University in New York.

The lungs, which were tissue-matched to each individual pig, were grown in the laboratory. Each pig received one bioengineered lung and retained an original lung.

For most people in a study of COPD patients, vaping cannabis had no clinically significant effect -- either negative or positive -- on their symptoms of breathlessness during exercise or on their exercise performance.

Over 46 years, more than 4,600 coal miners were diagnosed with black lung. Half of the cases occurred since 2000, the data showed.