Frequent Symptoms

Noticeable COPD symptoms may not show up until the disease is advanced and you've already incurred lung damage.﻿﻿

Common symptoms in early COPD, should they occur, include shortness of breath, wheezing, cough, fatigue, phlegm production, and chronic respiratory infections, which can range from mild to very severe depending on the stage of the disease.

Shortness of Breath

Shortness of breath (dyspnea), the hallmark symptom of COPD, can often be the first symptom to appear.﻿﻿ Shortness of breath due to medical conditions can be described in several ways, but many people with COPD describe dyspnea as feeling like gasping or labored breathing. The sensation is also often described as "air hunger."﻿﻿

Initially, you may only experience dyspnea when you exert yourself. However, as the disease progresses, dyspnea may occur even while you’re resting. A tool known as the Modified Medical Research Council (mMRC) Dyspnea Scale is often used to help quantify these otherwise subjective symptoms.

As a symptom, dyspnea is the most anxiety-producing, disabling feature of COPD.

Exercise Intolerance

You may be unable to tolerate exercise or moderately strenuous activities like climbing the stairs in your house. With advanced COPD, you might not even be able to walk from one room to another.

Healthy people generally need to breathe faster and deeper while exercising to get enough oxygen and energy. With COPD, air actually becomes trapped inside the lungs, a condition described as hyperinflation of the lungs. The disease prevents you from taking deep breaths when you exercise, so you can't absorb enough oxygen to get the energy needed for physical exertion. You will notice that you have to sit down and rest.

Sputum (Phlegm) Production

Sputum, also called mucus or phlegm, is a protective substance produced by your lungs to aid in the trapping and removal of foreign particles. Sputum is secreted by cells that line the airways (the bronchi and bronchioles) and is expelled by coughing or clearing your throat.

People with COPD often produce tenacious sputum when they cough. Causes of increased mucus include both increased production by the airway cells (goblet cells) and a decreased ability to remove mucus due to dysfunction of the cilia, the tiny hair-like structures lining the airways.﻿﻿

A large amount of thick sputum is often associated with a bacterial lung infection, which can exacerbate COPD symptoms.﻿﻿ The color and consistency of sputum may change when a bacterial infection is present.

Chronic Cough

A chronic cough in COPD is one that is long-term and doesn't seem to go away. Medically, it's defined as a cough that lasts for a period of at least eight weeks.

A cough with COPD can be dry (non-productive) or produce mucus. With some types of COPD, such as chronic bronchitis, the cough occurs daily and is associated with mucus production. Initially, the cough may be intermittent, but as the disease progresses, it may be present every day.

A chronic cough is often the initial symptom of the disease, yet it's one that gets overlooked because many people attribute it to smoking ("smoker's cough"), allergies, or other environmental irritants.

Wheezing

Wheezing is often described as a whistling sound heard during inhalation, exhalation, or both. It’s caused by a narrowing or blockage of your airways. Wheezing may or may not be accompanied by abnormal sounds heard with a stethoscope.

Chest Tightness

Tightness in the chest may give you a feeling of pressure within the chest walls that makes automatic breathing difficult. Chest tightness may be present when there is an infection in your lungs and it may make deep breathing painful (pleuritic chest pain), causing respiration to be short and shallow.﻿﻿

Airflow Limitation and Your Symptoms Long-term exposure to airway irritants causes the airways to become swollen and inflamed, obstructing airflow to and from the lungs. This process, referred to as airflow limitation, gets progressively worse over time, especially if such exposure continues. Airflow limitation directly correlates with the decline in lung function (and related symptoms) seen in COPD.

Chronic Respiratory Infections

Another common symptom of COPD is often having colds, the flu, and/or pneumonia. COPD makes you more susceptible to these illnesses because you're unable to clear out your lungs sufficiently.

Fatigue

Fatigue-related to COPD is different than ordinary tiredness. This poorly understood and often underreported symptom of COPD is something that doesn't respond well to a cup of coffee or even a good night's sleep.

Overall, fatigue is three times more common in people with lung disease than in those without it. While dyspnea is the most worrisome symptom among those with COPD, fatigue can be one of the most bothersome. But more than that, fatigue associated with COPD increases the risk of hospitalizations.