If you are tired of a dry cough accompanied by cold symptoms, you may have bronchitis! Patients who come to the doctor with a debilitating cough are most often diagnosed with this disease. When does bronchitis occur, and what is its course?

What is bronchitis, and how do you get it?

Bronchitis is an inflammatory disease of the lower respiratory tract. Distributed drip. If you do not want to get it, you need to avoid people who sneeze and cough. Bronchitis can be classified into three types based on their duration.

3 types of bronchitis:

  • acute – together with cough lasts about 3 weeks, is diagnosed after pneumonia is excluded
  • subacute – lasts 3 to 8 weeks
  • chronic – lasts more than 8 weeks

In acute inflammation, viruses (rhinoviruses and influenza virus) are responsible for approximately 90% of infections. In contrast, only 10% of cases are associated with bacterial infections.

Acute bronchitis: symptoms

At first, you may find it difficult to tell if you have a cold or bronchitis.
Acute bronchitis – Symptoms may be similar to those associated with other conditions:

  • fatigue and lethargy
  • Headache
  • temperature
  • muscle and joint pain
  • runny nose

Of course, they can be accompanied by a characteristic cough. – dry and tiring at first, especially on an intense morning, immediately after waking up. After a few days, you begin to cough up small amounts of yellow mucus.

How to cure bronchitis?

A visit to the doctor is inevitable, especially in the case of shortness of breath and chest pain during breathing, if the temperature remains above 38 degrees for several days, and, as in any other case, when the symptoms do not disappear after 7 days. If there are no complications from the disease, all symptoms of bronchitis should disappear on their own after a few days (about 10). Of course, only when you take care of it, you do not overstrain and rest a lot (at home, at a constant temperature).

What tests should be done to diagnose bronchitis?

To find out what is wrong with you, your doctor will carefully examine you. If he is in doubt, he will order a chest x-ray – mainly to rule out pneumonia. In the latter case, white spots will appear on the x-ray because of infection of the lung tissue. In addition to X-rays, your doctor will refer you for a spirometry test and bronchial hypersensitivity tests, if deemed appropriate, to be done if asthma is suspected.

What drugs help with bronchitis?

Які препарати допомагають при бронхіті?
What drugs help with bronchitis?

As with any disease, all the energy of the body must be directed towards fighting germs. You can include medications to relieve symptoms of illness: lower your fever (such as paracetamol), use syrups to relieve coughing up in the event of a wet cough, or those that work against the cough when you are tired of an unpleasant dry cough.

And antibiotics for bronchitis help only in case of a bacterial infection and the doctor decides whether to include them in therapy.