Why does it take so long to recover from pneumonia?
I was diagnosed with pneumonia in October. The doctor told me to rest, really rest. She told me to expect to feel better after a couple of days of antibiotics, but that I still must rest. She told me I would have good days, but they would be followed by bad days.
After a week of antibiotics, the bacteria causing my illness — presumably Streptococcus pneumonia — should have been dead. Also called pneumococcus, this pathogen is the most common perpetrator of community-acquired pneumonia, which is pneumonia that people get outside hospitals and nursing homes.
The antibiotic I received, a common first-line treatment, covers pneumococcus as well as other bacterial invaders.
Yet my doctor told me to expect weeks to months of recovery.
Friends with recent pneumonia experience confirmed this rather depressing outlook. Pneumonia can vary in severity, so not everyone will need months to recover. (Hillary Clinton, who had a highly publicized case of pneumonia in September, was diagnosed with a mild form and only took a few days off from the campaign trail.)
The scientific literature concurs with the anecdotal evidence I collected. One study followed 576 adult patients with community-acquired pneumonia. Thirty days after diagnosis, 65 percent of them reported fatigue, nearly half of whom said their fatigue was moderate to severe; 53 percent reported cough and 36 percent reported shortness of breath. Ninety days after diagnosis, 51 percent reported fatigue, 32 percent cough, and 28 percent shortness of breath.
Another study surveyed 500 pneumonia patients age 50 and older and found that tiredness, weakness and shortness of breath lasted more than three weeks, on average.
In addition to the burden of illness on patients, researchers noted burden on family members-turned-caregivers and on the health care system, including multiple visits to doctor's offices if not the emergency room or the hospital, says study co-author John Powers, an internist and infectious-disease specialist at George Washington University.
Pneumonia is a serious and potentially fatal disease. In Powers' study, about 40 percent of people with community-acquired pneumonia ended up in the hospital.
Pneumonia and flu together are on the top 10 list of causes of death, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
A 2011 study of health care records estimated that 866,000 cases of pneumonia occurred in the United States in 2004; in patients age 65 or older, pneumonia caused 242,000 hospitalizations and 16,000 deaths.
I went back to the doctor after two weeks because of intensely uncomfortable shortness of breath. She prescribed oral steroids in addition to a rescue inhaler to calm my overactive airways, which helped.
By Day 30, I felt reasonably well most of the time, but I still needed daily naps.
Why does it take so long to recover from pneumonia?
One reason is that the detritus from an infection of the lung is hard to clear. Antibiotics kill the bacteria, but all the weaponry your body produced to fight the bacteria — mucus, essentially, or sputum, as it's called once you cough it up — is left behind.
“Your clearance mechanisms have to take all that stuff out,” says Steven Simpson, acting director of the division of pulmonary disease and critical care medicine at the University of Kansas. Your airways are lined with hairlike cilia that consolidate microbes and mucus and help move it toward the exit.
“It literally takes a lot of energy to keep yourself going with all that stuff in your lungs,” Simpson says.
Cough is a primary way to clear the gunk. That's why doctors advise pneumonia patients not to take cough suppressants. You want to get that stuff out.
It's harder to explain the lingering of symptoms such as fatigue and weakness.
“We really don't understand the biology of this,” says Norman Edelman, senior scientific adviser for the American Lung Association, who practices medicine at the State University of New York at Stony Brook.
“Most people think that illness is related to the organism. That's only one part of the story,” Powers says. “Some symptoms, such as cough and chest pain, clear up relatively quickly. Fatigue, however, takes much longer. That's because your immune system is still revved up.”
The infection sets off a cascade of events that ramps up inflammatory and immune response, Powers says. “You have the bug, and you have the host response to the bug.”
A revved-up immune response requires a lot energy. “Your body goes into a mode where it's diverting energy to the immune system,” Powers says.
Simpson says the energy drain burns calories and proteins. When illness dampens appetite, that can exacerbate fatigue and weakness. He advises: “Eat good protein and take plenty of calories.”
And don't forget to rest — really rest.
“There's no reason to confine yourself to your bed, but don't push it,” Edelman says. “Don't make yourself exhausted.”
What about shortness of breath? This was the most bothersome of my lingering symptoms. Air would suddenly feel thick in my lungs, and my upper back would start to ache — the stress of labored breathing, my doctor said.
“Pneumonia can trigger a syndrome that is asthmalike,” says Powers, who has experienced it. “It's not asthma. It's a hyper-responsiveness of the airways.”
Triggers such as exercise or cold air can lead to that very tight feeling in the chest and labored breathing.
I felt as if I had a good idea of the scope of this illness — both from my doctor and from a handful of friends with experience. My case was not severe by any measure — I was never considered for hospitalization — and I don't have pre-existing conditions affecting my lung function, such as asthma or chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. I can work from home and steal naps during the day.
Yet I was still unprepared to deal with the worst bad days and sought medical care three times in that first 30 days.
This, too, is not unusual, Edelman says. “As physicians, our main job is to reassure patients.”
Symptoms of pneumonia
Anyone can get pneumonia. It's commonly a complication of a respiratory infection — especially the flu — but there are more than 30 different causes of the illness. Older adults, children and people with chronic disease, including asthma, are at high risk for pneumonia.
<span class="fact box text bold">The most common symptoms of pneumonia are:</span>
• Cough (with some pneumonias you may cough up greenish or yellow mucus, or even bloody mucus)
• Fever, which may be mild or high
• Shaking chills
• Shortness of breath, which may only occur when you climb stairs
<span class="fact box text bold">Additional symptoms include:</span>
• Sharp or stabbing chest pain that gets worse when you breathe deeply or cough
• Headache
• Excessive sweating and clammy skin
• Loss of appetite, low energy, and fatigue
• Confusion, especially in older people
In bacterial pneumonia, your temperature may rise as high as 105 degrees. This pneumonia can cause profuse sweating, and rapidly increased breathing and pulse rate. Lips and nailbeds may have a bluish color due to lack of oxygen in the blood. A patient's mental state may be confused or delirious.
The initial symptoms of viral pneumonia are the same as influenza symptoms: fever, a dry cough, headache, muscle pain, and weakness. Within 12 to 36 hours, there is increasing breathlessness; the cough becomes worse and produces a small amount of mucus. There may be a high fever and there may be blueness of the lips.
<span class="fact box text bold">The five main causes of pneumonia are:</span>
• Bacteria
• Viruses
• Mycoplasmas
• Other infectious agents, such as fungi
• Various chemicals
<span class="fact box text bold">Risk factors:</span>
• Cigarette smoking
• Recent viral respiratory infection — a cold, laryngitis, influenza, etc.
• Difficulty swallowing (due to stroke, dementia, Parkinson's disease, or other neurological conditions)
• Chronic lung disease such as COPD, bronchiectasis, or cystic fibrosis
• Cerebral palsy
• Other serious illnesses, such as heart disease, liver cirrhosis, or diabetes
• Living in a nursing facility
• Impaired consciousness (loss of brain function due to dementia, stroke, or other neurological conditions)
• Recent surgery or trauma
• Having a weakened immune system due to illness, certain medications, and autoimmune disorders
Source: American Lung Association