Studies suggest that only smoking cessation, oxygen therapy (used for 15 hours or more a day) and pulmonary rehabilitation can slow COPD’s progression.
Being aware of risk factors for the disease can help with earlier diagnosis and prompt treatment since patients who know the risk factors may question their own COPD symptoms before they’re diagnosed.
If you continue to smoke after your diagnosis, your lung function will decline more rapidly and the disease will progress much faster than if you were to quit completely. Other factors associated with COPD life expectancy are your degree of airway obstruction, your level of dyspnea, your body mass index (BMI), and your exercise tolerance.
A study published in the International Journal of Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease suggested the following comparative life expectancy rates:
Never smokers with no lung disease have a life expectancy of 17. 8 additional years. Current smokers with no lung disease have a life expectancy of 14. 3 yearsCurrent smokers with stage 1 COPD have an average life expectancy of 14 years. Current smokers with stage 2 COPD have a life expectancy of 12. 1 years. Current smokers with stage 3 or 4 COPD have a life expectancy of 8. 5 years.
Medical experts agree that quitting is the first-line treatment for COPD irrespective of whether you’ve smoked for 30 years or one. In fact, some studies suggest that lung function will improve (and even normalize) after smoking cessation, declining at the same rate as non-smokers of the same sex, age, height, and weight.
There are three values measured in spirometry that are critically important to making a COPD diagnosis: your forced vital capacity (FVC), your forced expiratory volume in one second (FEV1) and the ratio of your FEV1 to your FVC (FEV1/FVC). Monitoring your results over time helps your practitioner determine if your COPD is improving, staying the same, or getting worse.
Still, no matter what stage your official diagnosis says, the disease affects everyone differently. How good you feel and how much activity you can tolerate depends upon a number of factors, including whether or not you continue to smoke, how much exercise you do and the type of diet you consume.
The general goal of COPD treatment is to keep your oxygen saturation level above 88%. If it consistently drops below this (a state referred to as hypoxia), the current treatment guidelines recommend the use of oxygen therapy.
In addition, you may be advised to get a personal trainer, avoid fumes and second-hand smoke, invest in clean air equipment, get vaccinated, and lose weight.
There are three types of lung surgery your healthcare provider may discuss with you once your symptoms are severe enough and you’ve reached the most advanced stages of the disease: bullectomy, lung volume reduction surgery, and lung transplant.
Having a lung transplant may improve your quality of life and allow you to perform more activities, but it has not been shown to increase 10-year survival rates in people with COPD.
With that said, five-year survival rates for people who undergo lung transplants are in the range of 54%, while one- and three-year survival rates average 80% and 65% respectively.
