Risk Factors for atelectasis:
You might be at risk for atelectasis if you can’t take deep breaths or cough, or if you have an airway blockage.
Conditions that can increase your risk for atelectasis include:
- Surgery in which you’re given medicine to make you sleep (general anesthesia). This medicine can decrease or stop your normal effort to breathe and urge to cough.
- Use of a breathing tube
- Any condition or factor that causes pain when you breathe. Examples include surgery on your chest or abdomen, trauma, broken ribs, or pleurisy (inflammation of the membrane that surrounds your lungs and lines your chest cavity).
- Being on a ventilator (a machine that supports breathing).
- A blockage in your airway due to a foreign object, a mucus plug, lung cancer, or a poorly placed breathing tube.
- Lung conditions and other medical disorders that affect your ability to breathe deeply or cough. Examples include respiratory distress syndrome, pneumonia, lung cancer, and neuromuscular diseases. Rarely, asthma, COPD (chronic obstructive pulmonary disease), and cystic fibrosis are associated with atelectasis.
- Age — being younger than 3 or older than 60 years of age.
- Confinement to bed with infrequent changes of position.
- Impaired swallowing function, particularly in older adults — aspirating secretions into the lungs is a major source of infections.
- Lung disease, such as asthma in children, COPD, bronchiectasis or cystic fibrosis.
- Pressure on the lung caused by a buildup of fluid between the ribs and the lungs (called a pleural effusion)
- Premature birth.
- Recent abdominal or chest surgery.
- Respiratory muscle weakness, due to muscular dystrophy, spinal cord injury or another neuromuscular condition.
- Any cause of shallow breathing — including medications and their side effects, or mechanical limitations, such as abdominal pain or rib fracture, for example.
- People who have one of the conditions above and who smoke or are obese are at greater risk for atelectasis than people who don’t smoke or aren’t obese.
- Infants and toddlers (birth to 3 years old) who have risk factors for atelectasis seem to develop the condition more easily than adults.
