While chronic bronchitis causes a long-term cough that includes mucus, emphysema causes damage to the lungs. Excessive alcohol consumption can impact the health of someone diagnosed with COPD. Although alcohol may not directly cause COPD, heavy alcohol abuse can lead to a number of problems. As prevalence of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) continues to rise, many people have to reevaluate their lifestyle to make modifications. If the only time you develop breathing problems is after drinking alcohol, you should still see your doctor. You may have a rare allergy to the ingredients found in wine, beer, or spirits.
- Your doctor may provide COPD medications that can ease symptoms, as well as pain medication and additional medical advice.
- It’s long been known that a glass of wine a day can help the heart, and it appears that a drink may also improve lung function in both the short-term and the long-term.
- Researchers have not found clear evidence that drinking alcohol can directly cause chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD).
- Plus, we’re always introducing new features to optimize your in-app experience.
Over time, this inflammation can lead to permanent scarring in the liver and fatty liver disease. In fact, alcohol is responsible for more than a third of cases of liver disease that end in death. Another risk factor is alpha-1 antitrypsin deficiency, or AAT deficiency. This rare genetic disorder reduces the body’s ability to protect the lungs, which makes a person more prone to develop COPD. Researchers have also found some links between COPD and alcohol use. But these links, especially when combined with smoking, may be enough to discourage people from drinking alcohol if they are at risk for COPD or living with COPD.
Top Is It OK to Drink Alcohol With COPD Related Articles
If you have COPD, managing the symptoms and making lifestyle changes can be one of the most important parts of your treatment plan. Due to federal and state regulations, it is often difficult to conduct studies on cannabis. While experts suspect that smoking cannabis could contribute to COPD, more research is needed. It’s unclear if the same guidance applies to cannabis, but many experts do advise COPD patients to avoid any form of vaping or smoking.
However, for people with chronic diseases like COPD, the mild toxic effects of alcohol may sometimes pose more of a risk. Alcohol can also lessen the effectiveness of certain COPD medications, such as glucocorticoids and antibiotics. Glucocorticoids are used to manage chronic lung conditions, and antibiotics are used to treat bacterial lung infections. 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. If it’s determined that you have COPD, you should likely stop drinking alcohol.
Energy Drinks
“However, any form of smoke inhalation can damage the lungs,” Parsons added. Alcohol is known to kill some of the good bacteria that can normally be found in your mouth and throat. Without this bacteria, you will have an increased risk of experiencing a bacterial infection. In addition to that, killing the normal and good bacteria in your mouth and throat allows for bad bacteria to grow there instead causing potential dangerous infections. Because of this, the vapor in alcohol harms your cells in the upper and lower parts of your airway, leaving them inflamed and irritated.
Alcohol-related dehydration can also make it difficult to sleep, because it causes extra, thick mucus to build up in your airways. This mucus can obstruct your airways at night, causing you to cough and making it difficult to breathe while you sleep. Alcohol acts as a depressant, which means it relaxes your muscles and slows down many of your body’s normal processes. 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 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.
What Is Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD)?
Your doctor may provide COPD medications that can ease symptoms, as well as pain medication and additional medical advice. Drinking high quantities of alcohol can harm healthy lung functioning and thereby worsen COPD. Over time, drinking too much alcohol can weaken the lungs’ ability to clear themselves of mucus. This issue can lead to breathing problems and symptom exacerbation in people with COPD. According to some researchers, heavy drinking reduces your levels of glutathione. This antioxidant helps protect your lungs against damage from smoke.
Read the complete story for more on the links between smoking and drinking and a COPD diagnosis. If you drink regularly and experience breathing problems, go see your doctor. By avoiding the wrong drinks and following these treatments, you can better manage COPD and breathe more easily. Heavy alcohol use can also cause deficiencies in important vitamins, especially vitamin B, vitamin A, vitamin B12, and folic acid. Additionally, alcohol contains a large number of calories, which can lead heavy drinkers to eat fewer nutritious foods or to become overweight.
Additionally, some corticosteroid medications used to treat lung inflammation in COPD patients can be dangerous if you mix them with alcohol. This is especially true if you are taking steroids long-term or if you drink heavily. Clearly, people with COPD should be cautious about drinking alcohol. To help you better understand the risk, the following sections will explain in more detail how alcohol can affect your lungs, nutrition, and even interfere with COPD treatments.
Alcohol’s damage to the immune system is so well known that it is a syndrome called alcoholic lung. Airways blockage is the most invasive part of COPD and related respiratory disease. Whether your airways are blocked from excess mucus production or inflammation, this will result in reduced lung function and capacity. Finally, drinking alcohol in combination with anti-anxiety and antidepressant medications can have severe, and even deadly effects. Consuming them together can cause you to become excessively sedated and cause dangerous spikes in blood pressure. In the most severe cases, mixing alcohol and antidepressants can slow your heart rate and breathing to dangerously low levels.
Cannabis and Tobacco Can Both Lead to Lung Damage
“Alcohol and airways does alcohol affect copd function in health and disease.” Alcohol, August 2007. This may be a sign of an underlying medical condition, such as COPD. It’s important that you never quit alcohol cold-turkey without support, as doing so can cause serious health complications.
Does drinking alcohol worsen COPD symptoms?
People who tend to smoke heavily when they drink should also consider refraining from drinking. People with COPD or at risk for the disease should consult with a doctor before deciding whether to drink alcohol and how much. Research also suggests that alcohol could cause breathing problems by negatively impacting the healthy function of the lungs.
- In addition to causing respiratory difficulties, wine can produce allergic reactions and uncomfortable symptoms, like skin itching or flushing.
- However, these metabolites are also slightly toxic to the liver, and in large numbers can lead to problematic inflammation.
- They don’t prove that alcohol was the reason someone didn’t get COPD.
- Symptoms of COPD typically include coughing, spitting up phlegm (mucus), difficulty breathing, wheezing, shortness of breath, and tiredness.
The bottom line is that heavy alcohol use harms this whole process. Too much caffeine, found in coffee and energy drinks, can make you feel jittery. Caffeine can also lead to dehydration, making it harder for your body to clear mucus from your lungs. Drinking alcohol at night can also affect your sleep in other ways—by affecting the muscles in your throat and worsening obstructive sleep apnea. And since sleep apnea is very common in people with COPD (known as overlap syndrome), this is a concern that affects a large number of patients. Although many people use the relaxing effects of alcohol as a sleep aid, it’s actually more likely to interfere with a good night’s sleep.
There are two other problems with the studies that suggest alcohol use could prevent COPD. Always talk to your doctor if you have questions about COPD and alcohol. They can give you advice specific to you and your treatment plan and can help find the best ways for you to keep your COPD in check. If you have COPD and an alcohol addiction, it’s important to get help. Heavy smokers are much more likely to be alcohol dependent, Schachter says. Drinking alcohol can make you more likely to get a respiratory infection.