If respiratory distress develops within a few minutes or hours, it is called acute, for example, asthma attacks foreign body into the airways. Chronic respiratory failure lasts many months and years, it accompanies lung diseases such as chronic bronchitis, emphysema.
The causes of acute and chronic respiratory failure are:
- Acute and chronic diseases of the respiratory system
- Heart disease is the stagnation in the pulmonary circulation
- Damage to the central nervous system, muscles, nerves
- Heavy (critical) condition of any nature.
The main sign of respiratory failure is a complaint of shortness of breath - dyspnea varying degrees. In severe cases, when acute respiratory failure appears choking a man he says that he is suffocating. In patients with respiratory failure, breathing quickens, it becomes superficial, spasmodic. A man takes a forced position - sitting, resting in bed, chair. The skin becomes cyanotic, pulse very frequent, blood pressure first increases and then decreases. Because oxygen starvation suffered brain can be disorientation, loss of consciousness. Especially brightly it is expressed in acute respiratory failure. Chronic dyspnea is shown. Depending on its severity, there are three degrees of failure.
I - dyspnea on usual load;
II - dyspnea at light load;
III - shortness of breath at rest.