Treatment, Risk, and Symptoms of Aspiration - Essay Example

It is in this direction that the entry of food, fluid, or other foreign material into the lung is generally considered to be accidental because the lung is not supposed to harbor such substances (Wierbicky, 2008).

When any foreign material such as food or fluid enters the lungs, we say aspiration has taken place. Aspiration could be consequential and come with the risk of leading to a type of pneumonia known as aspiration pneumonia. Introduction Aspiration is generally identified to be more common in some people than others. For example, patients who suffer from dysphagia stand a higher risk of being affected by aspiration on a very regular basis. Dysphagia could pose a risk to patients because it is the difficulty in swallowing and such difficulty commonly leads to the misplacement of food or fluid particles.

It is also said that the male-to-female ratio of risk is 2:1 (Medscape, 2012). What this means is that more males are at risk of aspiration than females. It is for this reason that the control of aspiration is an important issue for health practitioners.SymptomsSymptoms of aspiration are varying and are often dependent on the level of risk. Most commonly, however, aspiration will be characterized by coughing, choking, fever, chills, leakage of food from the mouth, shortness of breath, and wet voice after swallowing (University of Wisconsin, 2012)RiskThe National Safety Council is quoted as stating that choking is the fourth leading cause of unintentional injury death (Medscape, 2012).

There are other critical effects that adults and other sufferers of aspiration face. Some of these include a permanent expansion of one’s lungs or trachea (Selius and Subedi, 2008). Once such permanent damages take place, the resorting long-term consequence is that there could be the development of dysphagia, which in itself is a risk factor for getting aspiration. Treatment practitioners often want to use the term conservative management because they have a feeling that aspiration is best treated when taken care of at the initial stage.

To this effect, some of the treatments prescribed include the need to place children in upright positions, not putting children in a seated position after ninety minutes of feeding, raising the head of the bed to 300, giving of thickened diet to infants, and reducing the quantum of food given to children in the mouths at a go. (Medscape, 2012). In its worse form, it is always recommended that broad-spectrum antibiotics be given especially if the victim shows no sign of improvement after 48 hours of conservative management.

What this means is that the rate at which there could be misjudgment at the time of swallowing by such children who have identical mainstream bronchi and trachea is higher than in those who have definite separation of these two important organs. Finally, all cases of local inflammation and its attendant anatomical disorders put a person at risk of contracting the aspiration. This is because such inflammations lead to the formation of granulation tissues, which in effect may seriously lead to obstruction of the airway.