How Does Smoking Cause Chronic Bronchitis?
“Hello I am Dr. David Burns. I am a Professor Emeritus at the University of California San Diego School of Medicine. Chronic bronchitis is the chronic cough that smokers have. It is by definition a chronic productive cough for three months out of the year, for two years in a row but in reality with most smokers it is a continuous cough and usually is fairly mild and often smokers don’t notice that. But what is happening is the cigarette smoke that you inhale into the lung is causing irritation to the tubes that you breath through. That irritation causes those tubes to swell and causes other cells to come in and thicken the walls of those airways. When you do that much like a tube or a pipe that develops concretions inside the pipe the narrower that tube gets the less and less air can flow through the inside of that tube and the more difficulty you have moving the air through so the chronic productive cough is often a hallmark of changes in the upper airway in your trachea and main stem
