Do Breathing Sounds Tell a Story? Crackling vs Wheezing

Vibrating the lung cells makes them promote inflammation which damages the lung. Asthma already involves inflammation of the airway tubes in the lung, so wheezing likely just makes things worse. And what’s going on when patients inhale and produce a crackling sound? Crackles are ruptures of liquid plugs in the smaller airway tubes that pop open during inspiration. The sound mechanism is very similar to drinking through a straw when you get down to the last sips at the bottom of the cup. The gurgling is a mixture of liquid and air with popping bubbles, just like a fluid-overloaded lung. The sequence is very damaging to the cells, and again they respond with inflammation and injury. How do you see this new understanding impacting diagnoses or treatments? Well, this is completely new territory. Since no one has ever viewed lung sounds as a cause of disease, they have not been investigating it. It’s a paradigm shift for a field that has a 200-year history with the stethoscope. Experimental models need to be designed to include measurement of injury, from cellular to whole organ level, along with measurement of sound. Our research group in collaboration with—Shuichi Takayama, a former U-M professor of biomedical engineering now at Georgia Tech—has done that for crackles in microfluidic platforms, but that is just a beginning. https://www.technologynetworks.com/diagnostics/news/do-breathing-sounds-tell-a-story-crackling-vs-wheezing-318241?utm_campaign=NEWSLETTER_TN_Breaking%20Science%20News&utm_source=hs_email&utm_medium=email&utm_content=71790839&_hsenc=p2ANqtz-89ko7bCIZ0SH5z59m72KU9_zOgDZWLbfigHc9_MB6doPJIIJCNhoENopzlr6BnsaY64z4Bzby3w-yN14nThiUJsKsIvA&_hsmi=71790839