NP Pulse: The Voice of the Nurse Practitioner (AANP)
Sep 23, 2026 · 30 min · 15 segments
On this episode NP Pulse*: The Voice of the Nurse Practitioner*®, we’re joined by guests Alanna Kavanaugh and Felesia Bowen to talk about obstructive lung disease, and specifically asthma. We’ll…
Alana CavanaughGuest
Felicia BowenGuestSophia ThomasHostAlana, while we get started, we're going to talk about obstructive lung disease.
And I'd like for you to start by just giving our listeners kind of a review of what obstructive lung disease is in general.
So when we use the term obstructive lung disease, what we're really talking about is a condition where patients have difficulty moving air out of their lungs because of narrowing or obstruction of the airways.
So clinically, we often think about these patients as having asthma or CRPD, but they also can have other obstructive physiologies.
The easiest way I explain obstruction is to think about when the patient takes a deep breath in and they blow out they can't get all the air and oxygen out of their lungs as fast as we expect.
It's really important as a nurse practitioner to not just stop at the word obstruction and really think about why these patients are obstructed.
And so in asthma, airway inflammation, bronchial hyper-responsiveness, bronchoconstriction, and mucus all really contribute to the airflow limitation.
And then how does asthma differ from COPD and the other obstructive lung diseases?
So patients have wheeze, cough, chest tightness, shortness of breath that fluctuate over time and sometimes quite dramatically.
And so airflow limitation can vary and patients can have completely normal spirometry and between episodes when their asthma is doing well.
Asthma is fundamentally an inflammatory disease, but it's also important to know that because of modern asthma treatment, we've really moved away from the simply treating the bronchial constriction with your rescue inhaler, such as albuterol.
And we've started to now understand and recognize that there's underlying airway inflammation that we need to treat at the core.
To talk about prevalence of asthma, there is 27.8 million Americans that have asthma, and it affects about 8% of the U.S. adult population and about 6.5% of children, just to give you an idea.
Alana, while we get started, we're going to talk about obstructive lung disease.
And I'd like for you to start by just giving our listeners kind of a review of what obstructive lung disease is in general.
So when we use the term obstructive lung disease, what we're really talking about is a condition where patients have difficulty moving air out of their lungs because of narrowing or obstruction of the airways.
So clinically, we often think about these patients as having asthma or CRPD, but they also can have other obstructive physiologies.
The easiest way I explain obstruction is to think about when the patient takes a deep breath in and they blow out they can't get all the air and oxygen out of their lungs as fast as we expect.
It's really important as a nurse practitioner to not just stop at the word obstruction and really think about why these patients are obstructed.
And so in asthma, airway inflammation, bronchial hyper-responsiveness, bronchoconstriction, and mucus all really contribute to the airflow limitation.
And then how does asthma differ from COPD and the other obstructive lung diseases?
So patients have wheeze, cough, chest tightness, shortness of breath that fluctuate over time and sometimes quite dramatically.
And so airflow limitation can vary and patients can have completely normal spirometry and between episodes when their asthma is doing well.
Asthma is fundamentally an inflammatory disease, but it's also important to know that because of modern asthma treatment, we've really moved away from the simply treating the bronchial constriction with your rescue inhaler, such as albuterol.
And we've started to now understand and recognize that there's underlying airway inflammation that we need to treat at the core.
To talk about prevalence of asthma, there is 27.8 million Americans that have asthma, and it affects about 8% of the U.S. adult population and about 6.5% of children, just to give you an idea.
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