Lung infection recovery time
What is a lung infection? What are the symptoms of a lung infection?
What are the causes of lung parenchymal infections?
What do you know about lung parenchymal infection or pneumonia?
What do you know about the treatment and recovery period of lung infections? What is the recovery period for pneumonia or lung infections? If you also have questions like the above questions in your mind, you can find the right answer by reading more.
Introduction, what is a lung infection?
Doctors use the term pneumonia to describe tissue infections with the lung parenchyma.
And it can be caused by a variety of causes, including bacteria, viruses, and fungi. Symptoms can be mild or very severe.
People get different types of pneumonia depending on their age and situation, as well as their exposure to the environment.
In other words, the causative agent of lung tissue infection or pneumonia is related to the characteristics of the person and the areas where there is more traffic. There are different treatments for lung infections depending on the severity of the person's symptoms and general health.
In the following we are going to talk about the recovery period after lung infection.
About the recovery period for lung infections, most healthy people do not have a general health problem during the recovery period after pneumonia, and if they are healthy and have no underlying disease, they will recover well within 1 to 3 weeks. In some people, but it can be life threatening.
Definition of pneumonia?
What is a lung infection?
Lung infection is a very common infectious disease caused by factors such as bacteria, viruses and fungi, most of which are spread by breathing and coughing.
The causative agents of lung tissue infection will be spread by coughing and breathing of the infected person in the environment.
It is said that even people who do not have clinical symptoms can carry the disease and spread it.
Once doctors diagnose a lung infection, they have no way of ascertaining which infectious agent caused the disease, so when a person's clinical condition is suspected of having a lung infection, doctors will immediately begin empirical treatment with antibiotics.
Classifications of pneumonia
The most common classifications for lung infections are:
- community Acquired pneumonia or CAP
- Hospital Acquired Pneumonia or HAP
Community-acquired lung infections mean that a person with this type of lung infection has not recently been admitted to a hospital, sanatorium or health center.
Lung infections in the elderly and people with strokes and cognitive problems is Aspiration pneumonia.
Aspiration pneumonia can be very difficult and deadly in some of these people, especially if they have underlying predisposing factors. Proper hygiene and vaccination can prevent pneumonia.
Causes of pneumonia
Doctors say lung tissue infection can be a combination of many infectious agents such as bacteria, viruses and fungi.
We must say that lung tissue infection is a disease and There are at least 30 possible causes for a lung infection.
It is important to know the cause of pneumonia infection, and this is important because the treatment of lung infections or pneumonia is completely dependent on the cause.
Epidemiology
It is estimated that the incidence of lung infections worldwide is about 14 per thousand population in one year worldwide.
An influential factor in this statistic is the geographical location and season as well as the demographic characteristics of different regions of the earth.
Statistics show that in the United States alone, the annual incidence is 24.8 people per 10,000 adults.
Cause of pneumonia
Viruses, bacteria, and fungi can be the infectious agents that cause lung infections. It is important to know which bacterium, virus, or fungus causes the lung infection, because the treatment plan is completely dependent on this.
About 30% of community-acquired lung infections in the United States are said to be caused by a virus. In children and young adults who do not have an underlying disease, the virus is the most common cause of lung infection.
The most common virus, causing viral lung infection in adults is seasonal influenza.
Other viruses that cause lung infections include:
- RSV
- Herpes simplex virus
- And severe acute respiratory syndrome virus or SARS
- And the new coronavirus in a recent pandemic.
What is the effect of lung infection, pneumonia on the body?
Most of the time, the nose and upper airways are cleared of infectious agents by the mucociliary system. This important physiological factor, i.e the healthy mucosiliary system, protects the lower airways and lungs from infection, but sometimes infectious agents enter the lungs and cause an infection.
What causes pneumonia or infection to reach the lungs are:
- Weakened immune system
- High pathogenicity of microbes
- Exposure to a large number of microbes
- Disorders of the mucosiliary system
How does pneumonia occur?
When the pathogen that causes a lung infection reaches the lungs, the air sacs become inflamed and become fluid-filled following inflammation.
These changes cause symptoms such as:
Fever, Cough and shortness of breath and chest pain when breathing deeply (pleurisy).
When a person has a lung infection or pneumonia, oxygen cannot easily reach the bloodstream through the inflamed membranes of the air sacs at the end of the lungs, so the blood will have less oxygen.
Impaired oxygen supply causes the body's cells to fail to function properly.
This problem, as well as the spread of infection in the body through the blood (septicemia) can be fatal.
How do lung infections affect the lungs?
Pneumonia is said to affect the lungs in two ways, and may involve one lobe (a small part of the lung) called lobar pneumonia. The infection may spread completely, and diffuse spots and opacities are called bronchial pneumonia or bronchopneumonia.
signs
Symptoms and manifestations of pneumonia usually develop suddenly and within the first 24 to 48 hours, or they may even progress more slowly to a lung infection.
The cough is usually dry or may have thick, greenish-yellow, brown or even bloody discharge.
Shortness of breath is another sign
The sufferer may be breathing too shallowly and rapidly. The person may also feel that they cannot breathe, and even when lying down horizontally, they may not be able to breathe easily.
The above symptoms are very common, but the following should also be considered as less common symptoms:
vomiting blood or hemoptysis
Unexplained fatigue, Headache, feeling bored and unwell, Respiratory wheezing, body and muscle aches, Feeling dizzy and Disorientation
These brain symptoms are usually more common in the elderly.
In what cases should we see a doctor?
In the following cases, it is necessary to call the emergency room immediately or go to the emergency room as soon as possible:
when your breathing effort is excessive and you have respiratory fatigue when you cough up blood, when your lips and mucous membranes are black and blue, when you fain, when you have a cardiovascular collapse, when you have dizziness and when you have stopped urinating or when you urinate excessively, when you feel fever and cold and tremors, and when you feel pale and lethargic and too bored.
Risk factors
Infants and young infants and the elderly, smokers, people with other underlying conditions such as asthma, cystic fibrosis or COPD, heart failure as well as kidney and liver problems, and patients with weakened immune systems.
We must say that bacterial lung infections have different bacterial causes in different people, for example in people with long-term vascular catheters and injecting drug addicts, Staphylococcus aureus with golden staph is the main bacterial cause, while in people with community-acquired pneumonia, pneumococcus is the most common factor.
Another point is that people who are hospitalized in ICU develop some form of pneumonia, especially people who are hospitalized under a ventilator, because ventilator-related infections are common.
In other words, they experience ventilator-associated pneumonia (VAP) as the most common nosocomial infection.
Recovery after lung infection
Depending on the underlying cause of the lung infection, specific treatment will be given to you by the medical team. It is said that when the cause is bacterial and the person suffers from community-acquired lung infections and has started antibiotic treatment, the underlying symptoms disappear in healthy adults without the disease two to four days later and the general condition improves in an acceptable way, but we must say that in most cases the person will recover completely within a few weeks (one to three weeks). Important point during the recovery from lung infections is that the clinical signs show improvement sooner than the chest image.
People with any type of lung infection are more likely to have a quick recovery from a lung infection in the following groups:
- People who are young
- Young adults that are healthy in other respects.
- People in whom a lung infection is diagnosed quickly and treatment is started quickly.
- People who have a healthy immune system and people who do not have a weak or defective immune system who can fight the disease well, as well as people whose infection has not entered their bloodstream and has not spread in their body.
- Also, people who do not have other underlying diseases at the same time.
- these people will have a full recovery within one to three weeks if they receive proper and timely treatment. We must say that the elderly, people with immunodeficiency and people with disabilities will need longer recovery time.