Mistakenly thought it was a cold, and almost lost my life! Don’t ignore these situations...

Have you ever had this experience when you had a cold?

My throat felt uncomfortable, and it hurt when I swallowed saliva. I even had difficulty breathing and chest tightness, as if someone was strangling my throat and I was suffocating and dying. The whole process took less than 2 hours.

Recently, a man in Ningbo went to the hospital for treatment overnight. When he arrived at the hospital, he was pale, had difficulty breathing, and was unable to speak... At first he thought it was a cold, but he didn't expect it to be so serious.

After a series of emergency treatments by the doctor, the man's symptoms gradually eased. It is understood that the man had a cold complicated by acute epiglottitis, a serious disease with a high mortality rate and easy to misdiagnose. There have been many related news reports before.

What exactly is acute epiglottitis? Why is it so terrible? And how can we prevent it? Let’s talk about it below.

1

What is acute epiglottitis?

Acute epiglottitis is one of the more common critical diseases in otolaryngology. It is an acute inflammation of the supraglottic area of ​​the larynx, mainly the epiglottis, and is also called acute supraglottic laryngitis.

This disease usually develops suddenly and progresses extremely rapidly. Often, there will be obvious and gradually worsening severe throat pain within 2 to 3 hours of onset, accompanied by difficulty swallowing. In severe cases, there are symptoms such as dyspnea and chest tightness. Some patients even suffer from glottal obstruction due to obvious congestion and edema of the epiglottis, resulting in severe upper airway obstruction in a very short period of time, causing sudden suffocation and death.

Acute epiglottitis is more common in adults, but if it occurs in the elderly and children, the condition is often more serious.

2

Is it because of this disease that people die from colds?

It was just a sore throat caused by a cold, how could he lose his life?

It should be noted here that the so-called cold refers to a common upper respiratory tract infection, which is usually not life-threatening and can be cured in 5 to 7 days without complications. If there are complications such as acute epiglottitis, acute tonsillitis, myocarditis, and pneumonia, it often indicates that the condition is more complicated. If the patient is not treated in time, most of them will be life-threatening. Among them, acute epiglottitis progresses most rapidly and can cause the patient to suffocate and die in a short period of time. This is also the common cause of death after the common cold.

There are two types of acute epiglottitis: slowly progressive and rapidly progressive, with markedly different mortality rates:

Slowly developing

This type of symptoms is relatively mild, manifested as sore throat, difficulty breathing, etc. Some patients may only feel a foreign body sensation in the throat, but do not pay attention to it and choose to buy cold medicine on their own, resulting in misdiagnosis.

Rapidly developing

The onset is often insidious, with mild throat pain at first. The condition will suddenly worsen within a few hours, with difficulty breathing, wheezing, and obvious throat pain. Some patients are awakened by pain in their sleep and go to the hospital for treatment. This type of disease is relatively easy to diagnose, but the condition is extremely dangerous, with a very high mortality rate.

Regardless of the type, not taking the illness seriously and treating it as a common cold is the most common cause of misdiagnosis and delayed treatment.

3

What are the causes of acute epiglottitis?

It can be divided into two types: acute infection and acute allergic reaction:

Acute infectious epiglottitis

When the body's resistance is reduced, inhalation of various pathogens through the respiratory tract is the most common cause of acute infectious epiglottitis. Clinically, Haemophilus influenzae type B is the most common pathogen detected.

Of course, trauma to the throat, foreign objects, spicy and irritating foods, inhalation of toxic and harmful gases, and other inflammatory infections of adjacent tissues and organs such as acute tonsillitis are also one of the causes of acute infectious epiglottitis.

Acute allergic epiglottitis

The cause of this condition is much more complicated. It belongs to type 1 hypersensitivity reaction, or it can be understood as what we often call an allergic reaction.

Substances that cause this type of allergic reaction include drugs, human or animal serum, biological immune products and some special foods. The most common ones are penicillin, which is the most commonly used drug, and seafood products in food.

This type of allergic epiglottitis is often most common in adults and tends to recur.

4

How to determine if the epiglottis is inflamed?

In daily work and life, once cold symptoms occur and are accompanied by the following discomfort symptoms, you should consider whether you have acute epiglottitis:

The severe throat pain gradually worsens and the patient is even afraid to turn his neck, chokes and coughs when drinking water, drools when opening his mouth, has fever and chills, body temperature is measured between 38-39℃, headache and fatigue, etc. The most serious thing is difficulty breathing.

If you are unable to determine whether you have acute epiglottitis, you must go to the hospital for treatment and, if necessary, cooperate with relevant examinations such as pharyngoscope to avoid delaying the disease due to neglect and causing lifelong regrets.

5

How to prevent acute epiglottitis?

If acute epiglottitis is treated with sufficient attention and identified early, early, adequate and combined use of antibiotics to control the infection and, when necessary, supplemented with hormone shock therapy can often quickly alleviate the condition.

Prevention is the main thing in daily life:

In winter and spring, when the incidence of influenza is high, pay attention to washing hands frequently, ventilating frequently, wearing masks, and exercising regularly to increase resistance and avoid colds;

Try not to eat spicy food in your daily diet, and avoid eating vegetables and seafood that are prone to allergies;

In addition, if you already have respiratory diseases such as rhinitis, sinusitis, tracheitis, etc., you should seek timely treatment to avoid inflammatory infection of the epiglottis and induce acute epiglottitis.

Expert in this article: Shi Libin, Director of the Emergency Department and Attending Physician of Shijiazhuang Ping An Hospital

Reviewer of this article: Chen Haixu, Deputy Director and Master Supervisor of the Second Medical Center of PLA General Hospital

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