Yes. That is what is so troubling. The American Lung Association, the European Respiratory Society and many international organizations declared 2010 the year of the lung.  In the United States, the CDC, the Center for Disease Control, is the government agency that keeps track of the most common causes of death.

The formal diagnosis of COPD is made with breathing testing or what we call “pulmonary function testing”. This is a series of tests which measures how fast air flows through the bronchial tubes, how much air one exhales with a full and forced exhalation, and how fast that air is flowing is the most basic measurement.

The most common symptoms of chronic obstructive lung disease are cough, mucus production, wheezing, and shortness of breath. And there may be any combination of those symptoms in any individual at a given time and one certainly has to recognize that the lung, like any other part of your body, has a limited number of symptoms that it can have.

We started off with our definition of chronic obstructive lung disease, or COPD, by including the notion that it is a not reversible limitation of the flow of air. And we think of asthma as classically having reversibility and the ability to normalize or come close to normalizing the flow of air.

In order to make various conditions more easily detected to patients and their physicians, different medical organizations have devised short questionnaires of 4 or 5 or 6 or 10 questions that’s easy for the patient to complete, and depending on how they score on that, get a relative likelihood of whether a given patient has a given medical conditions.

COPD or Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease is a disease that is characterized by what we call air flow limitation.  Air flow limitation means the air flow through the bronchial tubes is less than it should be.  The limitation of flow of air is not reversible...