The Link to COPD and CVD Nobody Talks About

The other day I had a family call me about their Mom. She’s in her early 80’s and has Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD).

Basically, COPD is damage to the airways or lungs that blocks airflow and makes it hard to breathe.

Excessive smoking of cigarettes is a big cause of it. Here’s the thing.

The mother of this family never smoked.

As the conversation progressed, the family told me that their mother is a Type II diabetic. I told them they should research the connection between Diabetes and COPD.

Some studies are showing that COPD is made much worse with Diabetes. In fact, many of the study participants had 10-12 comorbidities or other chronic conditions! It seems like when you have diabetes, you are at much higher risk of all sorts of other health conditions.

There was also a large prevalence of people in the study who were obese. Which makes me think even if those people did not have diabetes, they probably were pre-diabetic or insulin resistant.

Diabetes causes a great deal of inflammation throughout your body. That includes your lungs. It’s easy to see how decreasing that inflammation can improve your lung function and allow you to breathe better.

Another aspect related to diabetes is the amount of carbon dioxide you produce. When your body tells you that you need to take a breath, it’s not due to lack of oxygen. It’s a build-up of carbon dioxide.

High-carb diets produce more carbon dioxide than low-carb diets. Therefore on a high-carb diet your lungs have to work harder to remove the CO₂ than a low-carb diet. And high-carb diets are linked to insulin resistance and diabetes. Low carb diets remove insulin resistance and prevent or reverse diabetes. And low-carb won’t make you breathe as hard.

There’s also a link between cardiovascular disease, insulin resistance and diabetes. A study that came out in 2017 looked at about 8,000 cardiovascular disease patients in 78 ‘health centers’ across 24 countries in Europe.

According to the study:

“The results showed adverse lifestyle trends, a substantial increase in obesity, central obesity and diabetes. Despite significant improvement of blood pressure and lipid control many patients were not reaching the risk factor goals and there was no change in glucose control.”

It was estimated that up to 80% of the patients in the study had insulin resistance, were diabetic or pre-diabetic. Most of the participants had some form of diabetes or pre-diabetes. The estimates were for insulin resistance, which was not tested by the authors.

What was interesting about the study was that the authors didn’t see the lowering of blood pressure through medication as a large contributing factor to lowering the risk of CVD. Especially if there was no reduction in blood glucose.

Are you starting to see a trend here? Cardiovascular disease and COPD are two of the leading causes of death in the US according to the CDC. So is diabetes. So is Alzheimer’s. Which is known as Type 3 diabetes in some circles.

Yet the medical community treats all these conditions as separate. With different treatments for each one.

What if reducing your insulin resistance led to a reduction in lots of chronic conditions? Might be worth a try.