Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease in passive smokers

what the literature approaches about its prevalence

Abstract

The chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) is an inflammatory and chronic disease in the lunges, it’s progressive and makes that the patient shows tiredness doing small efforts, due to the pulmonary commitment. Among the most noticed symptoms in this patients are chronic cough, dyspnea, fatigue, the production of wheezing and expectoration. Approaching about the etiology and risk factors of the disease it can mention the advanced age, dust, toxic gases and smoking. Furthermore, the ones who don’t use, but are exposed to the smoke, that is, the passive smokers can also develop COPD. Therefore, through an integrative literature review, the purpose of this study was to review in the literature studies that approach the COPD prevalence between passive smokers. To this end, searches were conducted in the data bases Pubmed and Science Direct using the respective terms: “passive smoker” [AND] “chronic obstructive pulmonary disease” [AND] “prevalence”, that way, the studies that didn’t fit in the eligibility criteria and didn’t answer the guiding question were excluded. From the studies’ selection, it was created a form on Microsoft Excel to extract main data. In the initial search, 853 studies were identified, and from them, 823 were excluded, remaining only 23 to a more detailed verification. After a complete reading, five articles were selected for having relevant information, therefore, these ones were included in the review’s qualitative analysis. Subsequently to the included articles’ reading and interpretation of the exposed information, it was possible to verify that it has relation between the exposure to environmental tobacco smoke, this is, passive smoke and the COPD occurrence, furthermore it is associated to other factors. However, the founding values were low, mostly, plus, there is a gap in the studies that approaches the theme, so it’s necessary more ascertainments about it.