bronchitis
Meaning of bronchitis: One word covers a self limiting cough after a virus and a lasting change in the airways caused by years of irritation.
Definition of bronchitis
Bronchitis is inflammation of the bronchi, the tubes that branch from the windpipe and carry air into the lungs. The swollen, irritated lining produces extra mucus and narrows the airway, so the main feature is a cough, often bringing up phlegm, with chest soreness and sometimes wheeze or breathlessness. It comes in a short lived acute form and a long standing chronic one.
How bronchitis is built
- bronch/o Combining form · Greek bronchus, airway
- -itis Suffix · Greek inflammation
A medical term is read from its ending backwards: the suffix first, then the prefix, then the root. See all 223 word parts.
How do the acute and chronic forms differ?
| Acute bronchitis | Chronic bronchitis | |
|---|---|---|
| Usual cause | A virus, often the same ones behind ordinary colds | Long term irritation, most often tobacco smoke or workplace dust and fumes |
| How long it lasts | Days to a few weeks, with the cough sometimes lingering afterward | A productive cough on most days for at least three months in each of two successive years |
| Lasting damage | None | Yes, and it is counted as one form of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease |
| Who gets it | Anyone, at any age | Adults with sustained exposure to smoke or fumes |
Sharing a name hides how little the two have in common. Acute bronchitis is an infection that clears; chronic bronchitis is a structural change in the airway lining, with enlarged mucus glands and cells that have lost the hairs that sweep debris out. Environmental tobacco smoke contributes to the chronic form in people who have never smoked themselves.
Why is the acute form rarely treated with antibiotics?
Because the cause is almost always viral, and repeated trials have found that antibiotics shorten the illness by a negligible margin at best while carrying their own side effects. The cough is not evidence of a bacterial infection. Colored phlegm is not either, since the color comes from white cells and enzymes released during any inflammation. A cough after a chest infection can persist for weeks while the lining of the bronchi repairs itself, which is normal and often mistaken for treatment failure.
What else produces the same cough?
Several conditions are mistaken for bronchitis. Pneumonia infects the lung tissue itself rather than the airways, and tends to bring fever, breathlessness and abnormal findings over one area of the chest. Whooping cough can cause weeks of violent coughing spasms in adults whose immunity has waned. Asthma, reflux of stomach acid, postnasal drip and some blood pressure medicines each cause a persistent dry cough. In infants, inflammation of the far smaller bronchioles is a separate illness with a different course.
Used in a sentence
The patient was diagnosed with acute bronchitis after several days of cough and chest discomfort.
Good to know
Chronic bronchitis, unlike the acute form, is classified as part of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and reflects lasting change in the airways rather than a short lived infection.
Word origin
Where “bronchitis” comes from
Formed from Greek bronkhos, meaning windpipe, and -itis, meaning inflammation.