Pulmonary Fibrosis 101

The lungs are one of the most important organs in the body that are sometimes overlooked by people. When someone thinks of the organs that keep him or her alive they generally go straight to the heart or the ever-important brain. But the lungs are the main organ in charge of providing your body with the life giving substance, oxygen, that every cell in your body needs. Without your lungs none of the tissue in your body would be delivered any oxygen and you would quickly die.

            The lungs are a bit of a complicated system but it is easy to break them down into something understandable. Air first enters through ones mouth or nose then makes its way down the throat and into the trachea or windpipe. At this point the trachea divides into the two bronchial tubes and then those subdivide into each lobe of the lungs. The first division of these tubes is known as the bronchioles, which then end in alveoli, where the real gas exchange happens. Alveoli are very small little air sacs that are clustered together at the end of the bronchioles like little bunches of grapes. These alveoli have tons of tiny blood vessels known as capillaries embedded in their walls. Blood passes through the capillaries and gives off carbon dioxide and takes up oxygen and those are the basics of how gas exchange happens.

There are tons of lung diseases out there that hinder ones ability to breath but I’m going to be focusing on pulmonary fibrosis. To many people this probably just sounds like an odd combination of medical terms but if you define the words separately and put them together it makes a lot of sense. Pulmonary means lungs and fibrosis means scarring so pulmonary fibrosis means scaring of the lung tissue. These scars can come from many different places including chronic inflammatory processes, infections, environmental agents, exposure to ionizing radiation, chronic conditions, certain drugs, or for unknown reasons. The scars that form in your lungs are similar to ones you can get on your skin from a cut or from a surgery but they cause much bigger problems. Scars build up on the air sacs of your lungs, known as alveoli, and eventually cause the alveoli to become stiff and make oxygen exchange to the blood very difficult. These low oxygen levels cause one to feel short of breath and have trouble with exercising. Pulmonary fibrosis also isn't really just one disease, it's actually a family of over 200 similar lung diseases!

I hope this gave you a better understanding of pulmonary fibrosis and how the lungs work. See you next week!