Shortness of Breath Mnemonic: Causes and Examples

[Music] welcome back to the easy med channel where medical topics are made easy as you all know the goal of the easy med channel is to save you time in studying and help you with your career by giving you simple explanations for different medical and science topics and today i want to share with you a simple mnemonic i came up with to help you remember some of the main causes of shortness of breath the mnemonic is breathe and we're going to walk through this one by one starting with b this will help you think of bacterial causes this could include things like pneumonia or bacterial endocarditis which is an infection involving the heart and remember if the infection involves the right side of the heart that infection can spread into the lungs called septic pulmonary emboli and this may make the shortness of breath even worse r will help you think of reactive airway disease now reactive airway disease is a general term but i think it works well for the purpose of the mnemonic to help you remember all the obstructive pulmonary diseases so things that cause wheezing bronchoconstriction bronchospasm and this could include things like copd asthma bronchiolitis bronchitis and others now i didn't include it here but you can also use that r to help you remember restrictive lung disease so we have obstructive and we also have restrictive and this will include things like neuromuscular disorders interstitial lung disease obesity and others next is e and you can use this to help you think of embolism this will help you remember a pulmonary embolism which is an obstruction of the pulmonary arteries moving on to a this will help you remember acute coronary syndrome which will include all the conditions associated with decreased blood flow to the heart such as a heart attack or myocardial infarction usually this term refers to a spectrum of clinical presentations from either stemis or n-stemis or unstable angina for the purpose of the mnemonic this is just to help you remember that cardiac causes can lead to shortness of breath too so don't forget that also included in the a i put airway obstruction i like this because it's a general term that will help you remember any type of airway obstruction this could be a foreign body aspiration angioedema anaphylaxis and many others you can use the a however you want i like to use airway obstruction because it encompasses a lot of different things but if you notice angioedema anaphylaxis aspiration they all start with a so you can use those instead if you prefer now let's move on to t this will help you remember a couple different things tension pneumothorax and tamponade remember a pneumothorax is basically a collapsed lung it's an abnormal collection of air in the pleural cavity between the lungs and chest wall attention pneumothorax is basically a severe form of that in which the positive pressure accumulates so much it can lead to things like tracheal deviation mediastinal deviation or even cardiopulmonary dysfunction but for the purpose of the mnemonic the tension pneumothorax is there just to help you remember pneumothorax in general and then we have tamponade this will help you think of both the cardiac tamponade and pericardial effusion remember a pericardial effusion is when fluid builds up in the sac around the heart and then tamponade physiology occurs when that fluid builds up so much it puts pressure on the heart and disrupts the normal pumping function of the heart and this could lead to inadequate perfusion of oxygenated blood to tissues and organs this is a type of obstructive shock of note both the pulmonary embolism and attention pneumothorax are also forms of obstructive shock as well moving on to age this will help you remember heart failure it's both self-explanatory and easy to remember the last one is e and you can use this to help you remember several different things first you can think of electrical excitation this will help you think of arrhythmias which may include a fast or slow heart rate in irregular or regular rhythm and this could include things like atrial fibrillation atrial flutter supraventricular tachycardia bradycardia ventricular tachycardia and others e can also be used to help you remember edema this will help you think of pulmonary edema which is fluid buildup in the lungs and lastly the e can stand for effusion which will help you think of pleural effusion or fluid buildup around the lungs so as you can tell this is a great mnemonic to remember some of the main causes of shortness of breath you may have also noticed that this mnemonic focus is on the thorax mainly problems with the lungs and heart i do want to point out that this is not an extensive list and there are also things outside of the thorax that can lead to shortness of breath as well but i do think this is a useful mnemonic to help you remember some of the main causes if you found the mnemonic useful please give the video a quick like or drop a comment down below if you're new 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Channel: EZmed

Views: 113,407

Keywords: EZmed, Shortness of Breath, Shortness of Breath Examples, Causes of Shortness of Breath, Shortness of Breath Causes, Shortness of Breath Symptoms, Dyspnea, Acute Dyspnea, COVID, Pneumonia, COPD, Asthma, Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease, Congestive Heart Failure, Heart Attack, Myocardial Infarction, STEMI, NSTEMI, ACS, Acute Coronary Syndrome, Unstable Angina, Pneumothorax, Pericardial Effusion, Arrhythmia, Pulmonology, Medical School, Medical Student, Nursing, USMLE

Id: _JJhPCfbe8M

Length: 4min 38sec (278 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 04 2021