Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) is a chronic inflammatory lung disease that makes it difficult to breathe. We’re a neuroscience-backed app that has helped millions of people cut back on their alcohol consumption and develop healthier lifestyle habits. If we have any of these risk factors, adding alcohol to the mix is likely to increase our risk, given its negative effects on our lung and immune function. People who encounter high levels of environmental pollution are also at risk for lung damage that could cause the disease. In addition to decreasing lung function, alcohol can also create breathing problems while we sleep. COPD is a serious condition, affecting many aspects of life and putting people at a greater risk of developing heart disease, lung cancer, and a variety of other conditions.
- The substance is a diuretic, which can lead to mild dehydration, causing the mucus in the airways to become thicker and stickier.
- Even minor colds can lead to serious COPD exacerbations, and recovering from illnesses quickly is key for preventing further damage to the lungs.
- Your best bet at slowing disease progression is to quit smoking, reduce your number of drinks, and work toward an overall healthy lifestyle.
- My alcohol recommendations for someone with COPD are the same as they would be for anyone else, Han says.
- Many people who are successful ex-smokers or ex-drinkers had to try several times before they were able to quit in the long term.
- While small quantities of alcohol may be safe, heavy drinking can make COPD symptoms worse.
Can you drink alcohol if you have COPD?
Tell your doctor about any family history of related conditions, including lung cancer, COPD, asthma, or other breathing problems. In people with asthma, alcohol can trigger an asthma attack. With this in mind, it’s hard to determine whether their alcohol consumption contributed to their diagnosis.
Trouble breathing and drinking alcohol: Is it COPD?
In addition to causing respiratory difficulties, wine can produce allergic reactions and uncomfortable symptoms, like skin itching or flushing. While any alcohol can cause these symptoms to occur, wine specifically appears to be a common cause of allergic reactions. This issue can lead to breathing problems and symptom exacerbation in people with COPD. If you have this condition, talk to your doctor about the risks involved in consuming alcohol.
Excessive alcohol use can cause both short-term and long-term problems in your pancreas and interfere with your digestion. This can lead to a variety of symptoms, including fatigue, nausea, irregular heartbeat, and gastrointestinal discomfort. Over time, this inflammation can lead to permanent scarring in the liver and fatty liver disease. Heavy alcohol use over many years can lead to high blood pressure, an irregular heartbeat, and elevated levels of fat in your blood. But it also affects your brain in other ways; in the short term, alcohol affects the brain’s ability to control your mood, your memory, and your impulse control.
If you or a loved one struggle with co-occurring alcohol abuse and COPD, treatment of thealcohol use disorderis necessary to improve health and prevent complications. Some people with COPD may demonstrate allergic and allergic-like reactions following alcohol consumption. Alcohol-induced breathing problems during sleep can be especially dangerous for individuals with COPD, who normally havelower oxygen levelsthan most people. Drinking high quantities of alcohol can harm healthy lung functioning and thereby worsen COPD.
Getting sufficient, good quality sleep is necessary for staying healthy and living a fulfilling life with COPD. Many people with COPD already struggle with breathlessness, wheezing, and airway obstruction that makes it difficult to sleep at night. This mucus can obstruct your airways at night, causing you to cough and making it difficult to breathe while you sleep. Alcohol-related dehydration can also make it difficult to sleep, because it causes extra, thick mucus to build up in your airways. This can cause hypoxemia (low blood oxygen levels) which, over time, can lead to a variety of severe and life-threatening health complications in people with COPD.
It’s important that you never quit alcohol cold-turkey without support, as doing so can cause serious health complications. While there’s no cure for COPD, current treatments focus on managing symptoms. But as the condition progresses, the lungs will begin to show signs of overinflating as the chest gets larger. Diagnosis begins with a physical exam, medical history review, and a discussion of emphysema, chronic bronchitis, or asthma symptoms.
Mental Health and Loneliness
Researchers have not found clear evidence that drinking alcohol can directly cause chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). While an occasional drink may not be harmful, heavy drinking can exacerbate COPD symptoms and put us at a greater risk for respiratory infections. While researchers haven’t found clear evidence that drinking alcohol can directly cause COPD, alcohol can damage our lungs and our body’s immune response. Research shows that heavy drinking can elevate the risk of sleep apnea — a common breathing disorder — by about 25%. Chronic alcohol consumption can damage the surface of our lungs, making it more difficult to clear mucus from our lungs. Additionally, regular or chronic drinking prevents your lungs from keeping up a healthy airway.
But, despite drifting off more quickly, alcohol actually reduces the overall quality of sleep and causes frequent disruptions. This makes us more susceptible to all types of infections, including those of our lungs. The answer to whether we can drink alcohol with COPD isn’t necessarily clear.
Dangerous Interactions with COPD Medications
- That’s why, in this article, we’re going to help you better understand the risks of alcohol and how it affects people with COPD.
- Glucocorticoids are used to manage chronic lung conditions, and antibiotics are used to treat bacterial lung infections.
- This issue can lead to breathing problems and symptom exacerbation in people with COPD.
- “One or two drinks a day has not been shown to impact COPD,” says Neil Schachter, MD, a COPD specialist at Mount Sinai Health System.
- If you do drink, you should take special care of yourself to minimize any negative effects that alcohol might have on your lungs or your COPD symptoms.
Of those, nearly 7 percent reported drinking heavily. These problems result from reduced functional lung capacity along with lung inflammation and damage. Seek medical attention if these or any concerning symptoms arise after consuming alcohol.
Quit
If you have COPD, you’re probably especially concerned about making healthy diet and lifestyle choices. It is advisable to avoid alcohol entirely during an acute COPD exacerbation or when starting a new course of oral corticosteroids or antibiotics. Even a moderate dose of alcohol before bed can significantly reduce arterial oxygen saturation levels in individuals with severe COPD. This suppression can lead to nocturnal hypoxemia, a dangerous drop in blood oxygen saturation levels while sleeping.
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Particularly if we find ourselves coughing after drinking alcohol or experiencing shortness of breath after drinking alcohol, it’s best to avoid it. Furthermore, alcohol can increase the effects of anxiety and pain medications, which can cause our heart and breathing rates to slow to a dangerous — even life-threatening — level. Carbon dioxide is bad for anyone, but it’s especially harmful for COPD patients who struggle to expel excess carbon dioxide because of their damaged lungs.
Tabak, Cora, et al. “Alcohol consumption in relation to 20-year COPD mortality and pulmonary function in middle-aged men from three european countries.” Epidemiology, March 2001. “Allergic and asthmatic reactions to alcoholic drinks.” Addiction Biology, June 9, 2006. does alcohol affect copd “Alcohol and airways function in health and disease.” Alcohol, August 2007. Melissa Carmona puts years of writing and editing experience to work helping people understand substance abuse, addiction and mental health disorders.
Treatments for COPD patients affected by alcohol
In order to get mucus up and out of your lungs, the cilia have beat back and forth to move the mucus in the right direction. Alcohol also has a direct effect on the cilia in your airways, which work continually to keep too much mucus from building up in your lungs and airways. Thickened mucus happens as a result of dehydration, which happens more quickly when you drink alcohol. Continue reading to learn more about the risks of alcohol use for COPD patients and how to reduce your risk if you suffer from the disease. As you can see, heavy alcohol use can be detrimental to anyone, including people with COPD, for a variety of reasons. Even minor colds can lead to serious COPD exacerbations, and recovering from illnesses quickly is key for preventing further damage to the lungs.
Alcohol and Your Overall Health
Researchers have also found some links between COPD and alcohol use. According to the American Lung Association, 85–90% of COPD cases result from smoking, either directly or from secondhand smoke. COPD includes emphysema and chronic bronchitis, and is the third leading cause of death in the United States. This could make it harder to breathe and increase a person’s risk of COPD.
If you want to start feeling strong, healthy, and better overall, consider trying Reframe. It can also disrupt our sleep and decrease the effectiveness of certain COPD medications. COPD is a serious condition that impairs our breathing and impacts our quality of life. It limits our everyday activities, such as exercising, working, moving around, eating, and sleeping. Another risk factor is alpha-1 antitrypsin deficiency, or AAT deficiency.
Alcohol suppresses this ventilatory drive, making the shallow breathing characteristic of COPD patients more pronounced throughout the night. Alcohol may also interfere with the efficacy of antibiotics used to treat respiratory infections, a frequent complication of COPD. Both substances can irritate the lining of the stomach, and together they substantially increase the risk of gastrointestinal bleeding or developing peptic ulcers.
Alcohol consumption of any kind — even the smallest amount — can have a negative health impact on someone with COPD. Heavy alcohol use can also cause deficiencies in important vitamins, especially vitamin B, vitamin A, vitamin B12, and folic acid. This makes it more difficult to breathe and can reduce the amount of oxygen you get while you sleep. During the daytime, this might just make you feel relaxed and a little drowsy, but at night it can severely hurt your quality of sleep. Alcohol and corticosteroids are both irritating to your stomach and digestive tract, and consuming both together increases your risk of stomach ulcers and indigestion.
