Breathing Problems (especially At Night)

[A1A]

I have recently developed increasing problems with breathing.
During the day it is not limiting.
However, in the mornings I have been awakening with headaches.

A visit to the doctor was not helpful.
In fact, the doctor seemed quite confused by my report:

I have never smoked,
I live in an environment with fresh air etc.,
I have never had lung issues over the last few decades.

Aside from the breathing issues, I feel quite healthy.
There isn't any obvious reason for what the problem might be.
I was given a prescription of Pulmicort and was sent on my way.

The Pulmicort did not seem to be overly helpful; I used it a few times and then
gave up on it.

I recently received an electronic breathing measurement device.
Not surprisingly my PEV values are well below normal.
I should be exhaling at 570, but my values have been 450-500.
Inhaling is not particularly difficult, it is more on the exhale that my outbreath
seems to just stop.

I am very unsure what this might be.
I thought that perhaps it might have been our furnace. Perhaps dusty air was the cause.
However, I have learned that gas furnaces, do not fix combustion air with house air.
The hot air from the furnace is not the problem.

I also thought that possibly mold issues could be involved.
We had a mold problem that we did not address for a number of years.
Finally, last year the roof was fixed and the inside drywall was replaced.
The remaining mold problem is on the attic site that is sealed off form the rest of the house.

I have become more sedentary lately. This might be part of the problem.
I am making a point of being active at more regular intervals during the day.

I bought a bottle of colloidal silver, though this did not seem helpful.
I tried also tried 100 mg of Methylene Blue oral.


Escalating this with another visit to another doctor is becoming increasingly likely. though this time I want to be better informed about what the problem might be.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

 

[Blossom]

The Pulmicort did not seem to be overly helpful; I used it a few times and then
gave up on it.

This is a steroid so it needs to be used regularly usually 1-2 times per day to be effective if you are going to get any benefit at all. It sounds like you are desiring something that is more of a fast acting bronchodilator with immediate effects which is understandable.

If you decide get a second opinion or even follow up with the same doctor perhaps ask about a pulmonary function test. It’s a valuable diagnostic tool. (This is a conventional pulmonary perspective and not medical advice.)

There are many things people on this forum have done to help their breathing issues so I’m sure you will get more input. Best wishes.
@Tarmander and @ecstatichamster are two forum members that probably have some valuable insights.

 

[anyfit]

buteyko method.

 

[Opioidus]

It could be acid reflux, do you eat a lot of spicy or sour foods? Bloating can cause shortness of breath.

 

[Tarmander]

when you are having breathing problems, try getting on your knees, kneeling over so your head in on the ground in front of you and push your butt into the air. Does this help?

 

[A1A]

Thank you everyone for replying!

This is the most serious health problem that I have ever faced and I appreciate all of your ideas.
It had never occurred to me that pulmonary health might become an issue in my life.
There are not many risk factors that immediately occur to me that might have caused this.

Blossum, thank you for reminding me about Pulmicort needing a few days to take effect.
The doctor did mention this to me.

The results from the spirometer that I bought online are below.
While this is an incomplete pulmonary function test, it does show how I am below
normal results. Apparently, I should be near 580 on the PEF test (first figure below)
compared to my best result of 493 and close to 4 on FEV1 compared to my best ~3.
There is clearly a problem.

Yet, my blood oxygen saturation seems OK.
My first reading was 93, but after a few deep breaths I was up to 99.
Breathing during the day is not a great problem, it is more during the night when
my throat seems to accumulate mucus (or possibly a small amount of blood).


anyfit, thank you very much for your suggestion. I had no idea that a non-medication route
could be possible. I will certainly investigate this further. Fortunately, I have the pressure
of the thread on me to apply the Buteyko method to improve my breathing.


opiodus, no I am not a great fan of spicy foods.

It is a great mystery as to what might have caused this.
Here are some of the actions that I have taken to address this issue so far.

Visited a doctor and was prescribed Pulmicort.
(Tried it a few times and then abandoned it.)

I bought the spirometer which can measure PEV and FEV1.
Very low readings for PEV and FEV1.

I orally dosed 100 mg methylene blue on December 31st.
(I wonder whether this might have helped spike my PEV
on January 2nd?)

I have bought honokiol and have taken a few doses.
Not sure whether this has given any benefit.

Took a 2000 mg of vitamin D today.

I noticed that our humidifier was not turned on.
Perhaps this might be part of the problem.
Turned on the humidifier.

I have made a point of eating vegetables every day.
I had been somewhat vegetable avoidant.

I have bought a resistance breathing exerciser as well as a carbon dioxide detector.
(I thought it would be wise to check that the heating in our house is not causing a CO2 problem).

Tarmander, for me the breathing trouble is only really obvious when I wake up in the morning with a
headache.

During the day I am largely asymptomatic. Normal day time breathing is not an issue for me.
It is only when I attempt maximal respiratory function that I notice the problem. On a maximal inhale
at about 80% of maximum, I notice that there is restriction or a gargle/reverberation in my throat/ upper airway.
On the exhalation, almost right from the start there is a wheeze and resistance to the exhaling.

I remember reading about how people who breathed in deep water could permanently expand their
respiratory capacity (or perhaps it was cerebral blood flow) and change their intelligence level.
Have they found a way to achieve this without going deep sea diving? It would fantastic if
I could permanently boost my respiratory capacity with a simple trick.


Thank you again everyone.

Your comments are helping me to work through this problem constructively.
Given my personal tendencies, I would typically allow a problem such as this to escalate before I responded.

 

[A1A]

This is very exciting!

I think I am making some solid progress already on my breathing problem.
Thank you again everyone!

The suggestions made on this thread and the thoughts that have been evoked from
these suggestions are clearly helping.

Last night I investigated the connection between low vitamin D and asthma.
There is definitive evidence that low vitamin D levels is related to asthmatic symptoms and
treatment with vitamin D can help alleviate these symptoms.

I am elated!
I avoid the sun and probably have quite low vitamin D levels.
Supplementing with vitamin D makes a great deal of sense to me.
I took 5,000 IU today.

As part of a multi-pronged strategy I am now interested in reducing respiratory inflammation
and treating for a possible respiratory infection. My current hunch is that low vitamin D might
have exacerbated a respiratory infection which caused some inflammation. Any suggestions
that might help with the possible infection or inflammation would be greatly appreciated.
Might methylene blue be helpful for a respiratory infection?

I am so happy that I have my spirometer, so that I will be able to quickly establish whether my
idea is correct or not.

Thank you again everyone.

 

[Blossom]

Just in case I’d advise that when you use your spirometer it is crucial that you give it 100% effort- literally preform the test as if your life depends on it with every last ounce of effort you have within you. You should feel very taxed after completing a breathing maneuver. Lots of people do not do this and get false results. That’s what will make the biggest difference in getting the most accurate results possible.

There are two parts to breathing-oxygenation and ventilation. The spirometer tests ventilation parameters only. You can have one component good and one bad. Usually oxygenation stays fine longer than ventilation.

 

[tca300]

High endotoxin/gut irritation has given me breathing issues in the past. I think part of it has to do with the lungs being a major serotonin detoxification pathway, and the serotonin burden could cause them to function abnormally. Headaches can be caused by high serotonin as well, so both of those symptoms simultaneously could point to high serotonin.

Anything you don't digest well, or have even a mild allergy too can cause an increase in serotonin. The biggest positive change in my health was noticed when I removed things from my diet that cause bloating, gas and allergy.

 

[maillol]

I think vitamin D is certainly helpful but I would also second the suggestion of trying the Buteyko method. It has helped me greatly. Google "close your mouth pdf". Try going on a treadmill. Set it at a brisk walking pace on an incline and breathe through your nose. Try this for twenty minutes and I bet your breathing be improved after.

 

[A1A]

Thank you again, Blossom.
I am very excited that I appear to be making such rapid progress to resolving this problem.

My spirometer gives me 3 tries to hit the highest values and then keeps this highest value.
Typically my first try is the highest and the succeeding tries can be quiet a bit less than the first.

What I have noticed in my exhales is that about 1/4 of a way through an exhalation my airway completely shuts down.
It doesn't matter what I do from then on, there is no air flow.
Trying to push through a completely obstructed windpipe might be dangerous: something might pop.

This might be placebo (or wishful thinking), yet today I noticed that the windpipe was no longer 100% blocked at the 1/4 mark
of the exhalation: Now it is perhaps 98% blocked. This would not show up on my spirometer as it only measures PEV
(peak expiratory flow rate) and FEV1 (forced expiratory volume in 1 second). Yet, strangely the clinically relevant parater
for me is exactly this marginal air flow. If your brain is receiving 0 oxygen at the margin, you will symptomatically notice
this. Last night I did sleep better and woke up without a headache or other symptoms. I will look around for other spirometric
devices that can give me a more detailed respiratory analysis. For example, I would like to know my total inpiratory volume,
total expiratory volume, difference between the two, etc.). Perhaps I could find some DIY devices that I could use. For example,
possibly something as simple as brown paper bag might give me an accurate value for my inhalation/exhalation volumes.

I am unclear about this though what might be happening is that my breathing is being driven more by my inhales than my exhales.
The idea here is that I have no restriction on my inhalations. I can fully inflate my lungs to the maximum. So I can move in a great
deal of fresh air on each in breath. I am able to fully oxygenate myself as my oxymeter clearly shows. It is the exhale that is the problem.
Possibly carbon dioxide accumlates somewhat in the residual air after an exhale. Clearly if my inhalation were my exhalations I would
have much more serious symptoms. This is along the lines of your comment that differentiates oxygenation and ventilation.

My web searching has found salt water, tumeric etc. as good treatments for respiratory inflammation and infection.

I am very pleased that so much progress appears to be occurring.
Thank you!

 

[Blossom]

That’s fantastic. The obstruction on exhale is common for inflammation and asthma. I agree as mentioned by others that buteyko is worth looking into as well as getting vitamin D into a good range and paying attention to food reactions. Ultimately if you can get off the steroid and prevent needing one again that would be ideal.

 

[ecstatichamster]

Nobody had worse issues than me. And I was constantly sick from infections. Asthma was life threatening. And it all went away. I stopped all medications and started Buteyko. I won’t say it was an easy path but I never took another puff or pill and got completely better.

Buteyko saved my life.

I became a coach for Buteyko and helped numerous people. It isn’t all about asthma but that’s how it started with me. Now I’m healthier than almost anyone my age and I credit it to Buteyko.

Dr. Peat is someone I totally trust, and a great deal has to do with his recognition of CO2 as the central most important molecule in the body.

Bag breathing, Frolov breathing, can fix this. Mouth closed. Taping at night. Walking and building up air hunger. It can all be past you in a few weeks.

I will say that you can have a tight feeling and it’s fine. You can think you need more air and it’s fine. you don’t. I sometimes have tightness in my chest but it’s fine. It is actually protecting against taking in too much oxygen and hyperventilation.

 

[Noodlz2]

Opening your bedroom window, even just a crack, and/or your bedroom door can be very helpful. There are times when I feel like my breathing is very labored, and it is usually fixed if I open a window. As long as the air outside is good, and it sounds like it is where you are, this would be the first thing I would try.

 

[A1A]

Thank you everyone!
I very much appreciate your assistance.

I know that I would almost certainly never attend a support group for respiratory (or other) problems, so this thread is of great value to me.
There are just not many other people that I can readily think of that I know that have such problems, though clearly a great number of people
do suffer from these illnesses. When I was instructed about lung issues from a young age, it never seemed to be something that I could easily imagine.
I suspect that many people who risk their respiratory health by smoking or exposing themselves to various dusts are very regretful when they
finally experience low lung function. From what I have read leading clinical medical resources report that there are no treatments for problems
such as COPD. Once some substances enter the lungs, they cannot be removed.

Yet, for me there is not a great deal about my respiratory health behavior that I can feel regretful about. I have never smoked; I have never had
any asthmatic illness over many decades and I have not been obviously exposed to poor quality air. The only exceptions that I can think of are
the mold issue which did contine over a number of years and the re-dry-walling that we finally had done about a year ago and took about
2 weeks to complete to correct the problem. The doctor did not seem overly interested in this when I mentioned it. If I had it to do over again I would have had the roof reshingling done immediately once we noticed problem and I would have completely avoided the dry wall fumes and have insisted that a proper dry wall
saw instead of knife be used. However, the medical reference that I consulted talked about it requiring up to 10 years of chronic exposure for dry-wall silicosis
to develop. I am only about 1 year out from a short-term exposure.

It is very unclear to me what is actually causing the inflammation that is giving me the airway obstruction on exhale.
One can fix all sorts of downstream symptoms without ever addressing the actual cause.

OK, I might have found it.
Our humidifier does not appear to be functioning.
It might not have been functioning for quite some time.
This could be it!

Solving the actual problem instead of fixing symptoms means that we could actually resolve the problem!!!

 

[Parrot]

A third recommendation for the Buteyko method. I learnt this when I had sleep apnoea and it cured the problem. I still sleep with my mouth taped so I breathe through my nose and if I forget to do this my mouth is always very dry in the morning.

 

[A1A]

Thank you everyone!

It is very exciting to have a medical problem in which there is a digital readout for biomarkers and it can be used in biofeedback.
Fortunately, interventions appear to be able to rapidly change my biomarkers!

I will not post my daily readouts yet, but I was able to hit an all-time high (i.e., for the last week) on my PEV today and FEV1 yesterday!
These are not large improvements, though improvements nonetheless.

My current treatment plan includes:

- 5,000 IU vitamin D per daily
(I will scale back to 2,000 IU in a bit.)

- Lung detox formula: 1 tablespoon tumeric with sprinkle of black pepper boiled in water and served as a tea.
(There is a similar formula online for a 3 day lung detox that adds brown sugar, onion and ginger.)

- Open bedroom window a crack at night
(When I think back on it, I remember using this effective trick when I had previous breathing problems related to the re-drywalling
about a year ago. I had forgotten about this because I only needed this for a week or two as the dry wall dust cleared. It seemed to
immediately help with night time breathing problems. This morning I noticed that it helped as well. Thank you, Noodlz2!
This does suggest to me that there must be some problem with the air inside.)

- No more cooking with our natural gas stove elements
( Research has found that natural gas elements create all sorts of noxious gases. It makes no sense to me why someone would burn
a hydrocarbon in a confined space. We have electric elements, so I replaced the gas ones.

- Daily household dusting
(We have let our dusting duties lapse somewhat. No time like the present to catch up!)

- Increase my daily exposure to outside air
(Outdoor air is usually much less polluted than indoor air. I'll see if this helps.)

- More daily movement. I have my fitness tracker back online, so I will attempt to
keep up with my daily step goal.


maillol, thank you for the suggestion of 20 minutes of exercise with nose breathing.
I tried this (at this point I would try any easily implemented suggestion), though I did
not notice an immediate improvement in my PEV nor FEV1. However, I realize that many
treatments are not meant necessarily to offer instant gratification; more about
a longer term payout.

tca3000, the one diet change that might help me is to cut back on milk. Problem is that I am
somewhat of a milk addict. It is one of my main food staples. I am not sure where the thread
stands on this, although I am aware that some natural health people are anti-milk. I think
I'll continue to make adjustments to the low hanging fruit before making the tougher changes.

I have had many recommendations for the Buteyko method. I am still unclear what the Buteyko
method is exactly, though given all these suggestions, I will need to investigate this. Perhaps
my breath resistance device that is en route is an application of this technique. Hamster, after I
have made my other lifestyle changes your guidance would be greatly appreciated.


I am anxious to buy a humidity monitor.
Apparently our central air humidifier has been non-functional.
Understanding our home's humidity behavior might be one of the big breakthroughs
in finding the underlying reason for my breathing problem. I suspect the problem
is multifactorial, thought the more factors that I can correct the faster that I can return to normal.

Methylene blue might be another supplement that I might help. I was reading today that mitochondrial
dysfunction is an important underlying driver of respiratory pathology. Perhaps MB might help.


In the course of my reading I have discovered that there has been a respiratory health revolution
over the last quarter century. Yeah! I had been entirely unaware of this seismic change in pulmonary health.

High income nations have seen age standardized reductions of up to ~75% in different measures of rates
of COPD, asthma etc. over the last 25 years. It has been a tectonic shift! Often in medicine, treatment gains
from one decade to the next can be almost undetectable: Not so with respiratory health. There have been
very large changes. These gains might in fact even be independent of medical technology advances as cleaning up
the air would prevent the need for downstream medical interventions. Interestingly, it appears that yet more gains
are possible because some European nations have even lower rates of illness than are present in most other Western nations.

One of the better descriptions of the current time might be the Era of Clean Air. With the arrival of solar cell
and possibly fuel cell technology, we might be on the verge of a post-combustion society. This would be great!
Eliminating respiratory pathogens might be possible if we make a concerted effort to clean up our air.

 

[Noodlz2]

If you are experimenting with dairy, try using mozzarella cheese instead of milk. Preferably one that does not use lactic acid. I find that the dairy that mildly stuffs up my sinuses are liquidy (milk, wet cottage cheese, ice cream). Mozzarella is probably the cheese that has the least problems with sensitivities in my experience. Paneer, may be a good option too. Also, drained cottage cheese. The mozzarella cheeses at Trader Joes have been great.

I am curious where you live. I am always on the lookout for places with good air.

 

[Aad]

Nobody had worse issues than me. And I was constantly sick from infections. Asthma was life threatening. And it all went away. I stopped all medications and started Buteyko. I won’t say it was an easy path but I never took another puff or pill and got completely better.

Buteyko saved my life.

I became a coach for Buteyko and helped numerous people. It isn’t all about asthma but that’s how it started with me. Now I’m healthier than almost anyone my age and I credit it to Buteyko.

Dr. Peat is someone I totally trust, and a great deal has to do with his recognition of CO2 as the central most important molecule in the body.

Bag breathing, Frolov breathing, can fix this. Mouth closed. Taping at night. Walking and building up air hunger. It can all be past you in a few weeks.

I will say that you can have a tight feeling and it’s fine. You can think you need more air and it’s fine. you don’t. I sometimes have tightness in my chest but it’s fine. It is actually protecting against taking in too much oxygen and hyperventilation.

This is great to hear! What can you do against excessive phlegm production in the lungs which causes you to constantly be out of breathe?

 

[ecstatichamster]

This is great to hear! What can you do against excessive phlegm production in the lungs which causes you to constantly be out of breathe?

you want to strive for air hunger, just a bit of air hunger. That will initially lead to more mucus. Let it stay there. Avoid coughing. If you must cough try to suppress it. Exhale and just pause for a few.

It's perfectly okay to feel out of breath and have phleghm. The mucus will become re-sorbed on its own.