Symptoms of pulmonary edema, most commonly acute pulmonary edema

Common causes of pulmonary edema include infection and inflammation, autoimmune diseases, and pulmonary edema caused by many lung diseases. Generally, acute pulmonary edema is more common, and the only symptom in the early stage is cough, which is especially obvious at night.

1. Symptoms

The initial symptoms of acute pulmonary effusion may be just coughing, especially coughing in the middle of the night and being unable to lie flat. It is often mistaken for tracheitis or a cold and not taken seriously. In fact, if you experience dyspnea, shortness of breath, paroxysmal nocturnal dyspnea

Do not ignore symptoms such as feeling uncomfortable, sitting up to breathe (thopnea), or even having to sleep sitting down, as these are among the clinical symptoms of acute pulmonary edema.

Acute pulmonary edema also often occurs in the autumn and winter when the weather turns cold. The main causes are coronary artery disease, systemic hypertension, enlarged cardiomyopathy, valvular heart disease, myocarditis, uremia, etc. If you have poor blood pressure control, arrhythmia, infection, fluid overload

, anemia, stress or poor patient compliance can easily worsen heart failure and cause acute pulmonary edema.

2. Common Causes

1. Cough

It is the most common cause of pulmonary edema. The early cough can be very mild, often presenting as a single cough, or what we commonly call a half cough, a dry cough without sputum, and the degree of impact on work and life is not obvious. As the disease progresses, the cough may worsen. When accompanied by endobronchial tuberculosis, the cough may intensify and sometimes choking cough may occur. For patients with long-term illness, if bronchial displacement occurs, the trachea is pulled due to adhesions of the lesions, or the bronchi are deformed by compression of surrounding lymph nodes, an irritating cough may occur due to poor ventilation. This cough is like the choking cough caused by eating food, and may even cause difficulty breathing.

2. Coughing up phlegm

In the early stage of the disease, there is no obvious expectoration, or there is a small amount of white mucus sputum, but the amount of sputum will increase when the lesion expands or even cavities appear in the lungs. When there is infection with other pathogenic bacteria, the amount of sputum will also increase, and yellow purulent sputum may appear, and it may also be accompanied by systemic symptoms such as fever and chills.

3. Chest pain

Chest pain is also the main cause of pulmonary edema, but generally chest pain can only occur when the lesion spreads to the pleura, especially the parietal pleura. The parietal pleura is the tuberculosis of the front thorax and lungs. Sometimes there is dull pain in an undetermined location, which is caused by nerve reflex and is not affected by lung breathing movement. If there is a fixed tingling pain in a certain area and it gets worse with breathing and coughing, it means that the inflammation is irritating the pleura. Some patients often feel pain in the shoulders or upper abdomen, which is most likely caused by inflammation irritating the diaphragm through nerve reflexes.