If you or someone in your family suffers from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), you may already know that there’s a connection between COPD and obesity. In other words, excess weight can worsen the symptoms of COPD, while this pulmonary disease can make it difficult for someone to keep a healthy weight.
Plus, both obesity and COPD can increase the risk of heart disease and even double it if you have both of these conditions. Hence, let’s see what you should know about COPD and obesity:
How do COPD and Obesity Affect Health?
In general, both of these conditions can have a negative influence on the overall health condition.
COPD is characterized by breathing difficulties which decrease the oxygen levels in the body, leading to fatigue. Another common symptom of this condition is shortness of breath when performing physical activities, also known as exercise intolerance. This will eventually lead to an increased risk of obesity since the patient cannot do any exercise and will probably have a sedentary lifestyle.
On the other hand, obesity can slowly decline the function and performance of the lungs, especially if you have COPD too. So, obese people usually experience breathing difficulties and dyspnea (shortness of breath). But, obesity also leads to fatigue, like COPD, as a result of carrying excess weight that makes it a struggle to perform daily activities.
What’s more, there’s also a connection between obesity and sleep apnea which is a condition that results in breathing interruptions during sleep. Also, COPD increases the risk of transient nocturnal desaturation, i.e. low blood oxygen levels while asleep. These two result in low energy, impaired overall health, and exacerbated daytime symptoms.
How to Diagnose COPD and Obesity?
By calculating your body mass index (BMI), measuring your weight and height and the link between them, you can easily determine whether or not you are obese. Precisely speaking, you are obese if your BMI is over 30.0, overweight between 25 and 29.9, normal 18.5 to 24.9, and underweight if your BMI is less than 18.5.
COPD and the severity of the condition can be diagnosed with a chest X-ray or computed tomography (CT), both of which are imaging tests. And, to assess the function of the lungs in COPD patients, a pulmonary function test (PFT) is used. This test measures forced vital capacity (FVC), forced expiratory volume in one second (FEV1), and total lung capacity (TLC).
How to Treat COPD and Obesity?
Namely, if you are a COPD patient and are obese or overweight, you should take weight loss quite seriously and make it a vital part of your treatment plan. To successfully and effectively lose excess weight you have to combine a healthy diet and physical activity.
The truth is, exercise is very important for pulmonary rehabilitation. However, the exercise plan should be medically guided at first and specifically made for you. And, to increase exercise tolerance efficiently, ensure you work with a pulmonary therapist.
Another aspect of treating these conditions is diet, as we already mentioned above. But, ensure you seek professional help when creating your diet plan to make sure you intake all of the nutrients needed, especially if you are low in some like vitamin B12 or calcium.
The bottom line, the link between obesity and COPD is quite obvious. Luckily, you can easily alleviate the symptoms by following a healthy regimen to get rid of that troublesome excess weight. Just consult your medical team before making any changes.