Worried About Aspiration Pneumonia?

I am.  It’s one of the three most-likely ways you can die from Parkinson’s disease, according to the scary but necessary-to-know-about, recently published The elephant in the room:  critical reflections on mortality rates among individuals with Parkinson’s disease.  (Click here to see my blog post on this article.)

Aspiration pneumonia happens when food or drink enter your lungs.  How does it get there?  There are two ways.  It can happen while you are eating or drinking, and when you swallow, some of the food/drink “goes down the wrong pipe,” causing you to cough.  If you don’t cough forcefully enough, your food and drink can end up in your lungs.

It can also happen when you’ve swallowed something and a few minutes later feel the need to burp.  You go ahead an allow your stomach to burp, but some of the food you’ve just eaten comes up with it, except not all the way, and it gets diverted into your lungs.

Technically, what happens is that the epiglottis, a flap of skin at the back of your tongue, doesn’t do what it’s supposed to do.  It’s supposed to cover the entrance to your trachea (your wind pipe) so that nothing solid or liquid enters your lungs.   If the eipglottis does not do this essential task, you end up with pneumonia along with the trapped food.  Here’s Wikipedia’s opening paragraph on the subject:

Aspiration pneumonia is a type of lung infection that is due to a relatively large amount of material from the stomach or mouth entering the lungs.  Signs and symptoms often include fever and cough of relatively rapid onset.  Complications may include lung abscess, acute respiratory distress syndrome, empyema, and parapneumonic effusion.

And here’s Wikipedia’s drawing, which makes more sense to the average reader:

If you start to experience foods and drink bubbling up from your stomach and detouring into your windpipe, you may want to avoid these foods, which are often linked to the condition (see examples in the photo at the top of this post):

• Citrus fruits and juices
• Tomatoes and tomato-based products
• Spicy foods
• Fried and fatty foods
• Carbonated and caffeinated beverages
• Chocolate
• Alcoholic beverages

Final warning:

The reported prevalence of dysphagia [difficulty in swallowing] in patients with Parkinson’s disease ranges from 20% to 100% due to variations in the methods of assessing the swallowing function.  Unlike some medical problems, such as stroke, dysphagia in Parkinson’s Disease degenerates with disease progression. Aspiration pneumonia was the most common reason for the emergency admission of patients with Parkinson’s Disease whose disease duration was >5 years and pneumonia was one of the main causes of death.