What is the cause of chest pain when breathing

Breathing is a normal physiological need of the human body. In the medical field, whether a person is breathing is often used as one of the important signs to determine whether there are life characteristics. Once breathing disappears, it also means that the person's life is facing exhaustion. The human body's breathing condition is often closely related to the health of our respiratory tract. As we age, many people experience shortness of breath and chest pain. What is going on?

If you experience chest pain when you breathe in your 20s or 30s, it is usually due to overwork or long-term nutritional deficiencies leading to pleural effusion. The typical symptom is stabbing pain in the chest when you take a deep breath and you are afraid to take a long breath. It can usually be detected with a chest X-ray.

If the patient is middle-aged or elderly and has these symptoms, lung cancer or mediastinal tumor cannot be ruled out. Most of these people have these symptoms due to long-term smoking. It is best for these people to have a CT scan and then a puncture to take a biopsy to see if there are cancer cells.

If a teenager has chest pain when breathing, it may be pneumonia or a combination. It can also be seen through a chest X-ray. Be sure to check whether it is tuberculosis, because it is highly contagious. If the bacteria are excreted outside the body, it is relatively dangerous and easily contagious. So when we have chest pain, we should immediately put down what we are doing and get checked.

In addition, chest pain when breathing may also be pneumothorax. Pneumothorax usually occurs suddenly, and the patient will have symptoms of side chest pain, which is generally manifested as tearing pain, stabbing pain or dull pain, accompanied by rapid breathing, shortness of breath, coughing, etc. The cough is generally an irritating cough. Some patients also experience a feeling of suffocation, and in severe cases, they become irritable and restless. The patient's heartbeat increases, his face turns purple, his pulse becomes weak, he sweats profusely, and he has extreme difficulty breathing, which then develops into coma and unconsciousness, posing a serious threat to his life.

Symptoms range from mild discomfort to severe dyspnea, shock, and life-threatening respiratory and circulatory failure. Initially, there is sudden and severe chest pain, difficulty breathing, and occasional dry cough. The pain may radiate to the ipsilateral shoulder, contralateral chest, or abdomen and may mimic acute coronary embolism or "acute abdomen." The symptoms of slowly developing pneumothorax are generally not too serious and usually disappear as the changed physiological state adjusts.

When the amount of air is small, there may be no physical signs or only weakened speech and breath sounds. If the pneumothorax contains a large amount of air or is a tension pneumothorax, there will be a percussion tympanic sound, weakened or absent vocal fremitus, and weakened movement on the affected side. Mediastinal shift may be manifested by cardiac dullness and apex beat shifted toward the healthy side. Breath sounds are significantly reduced or absent. In patients with spontaneous pneumothorax, hypoxemia is mild or absent, but patients with complex pneumothorax may have severe hypoxemia accompanied by hypercapnia.