Acute Medicine | Respiratory | Drugs that can cause breathlessness and underlying lung disease

Drugs That Can Cause Breathlessness and Underlying Lung Disease
Session Overview
Description
This session looks at drugs commonly associated with causing shortness of breath, the underlying pathogenisis of the pulmonary drug reaction and clinical manifestations.

Learning Objectives
By the end of this session you will be able to:

• Identify the mechanism by which drugs affect the respiratory system and list the top five drugs in each category

Patients with shortness of breath constitute a large proportion of the general medical intake. Therefore, familiarity with common causes such as pulmonary oedema, pneumonia, asthma/COPD or pleural effusion in a patient presenting with difficulty in breathing is crucial.

This session encourages you to focus on drug induced causes of shortness of breath. There are over 350 different drugs causing adverse respiratory side-effects. Doctors prescribe medications several times a day and so it is important to be knowledgeable about known drug induced side-effects and to be cautious enough to recognise the clinical features early on.

As part of this session you will become familiar with a target list of drugs, in particular the underlying pathogenesis of the pulmonary drug reaction and clinical manifestations.