What does it mean when a patient coughs up blood

Coughing is a symptom that many people experience when they have a cold or a respiratory infection. If the cough is not treated in time, severe cough symptoms may cause coughing up blood. The phenomenon of coughing up blood means that the disease causing the coughing symptoms has reached a more serious stage. So what disease is causing the patient's coughing up blood?

Lung cancer is one of the most common respiratory malignancies, with an increasing incidence rate year by year. Coughing up blood is one of the main symptoms of lung cancer. Whenever lung cancer develops to the middle or late stages, there will be obvious symptoms of coughing up blood.

Coughing up blood, also known as hemoptysis, refers to the process in which bleeding occurs from the respiratory organs below the throat (i.e., the trachea, bronchi, or lung tissue) and is discharged from the mouth through coughing. Hemoptysis can be caused not only by respiratory diseases, but also by circulatory system diseases, trauma, and other systemic diseases or systemic factors. It should be differentiated from bleeding in the oral cavity, pharynx, nose and hematemesis.

The colors of hemoptysis are as follows:

(1) Bright red, caused by tuberculosis, bronchiectasis, lung abscess and hemorrhagic diseases.

(2) Rust-colored bloody sputum can be seen in typical pneumococcal pneumonia, paragonimiasis, and alveolar hemorrhage.

(3) Dark red: hemoptysis caused by mitral valve stenosis.

(4) Serous pink foamy sputum, left heart failure.

(5) Thick dark red bloody sputum caused by pulmonary infarction.

It can be seen from this that if the coughing up blood is caused by a tumor in the trachea or bronchus, it will be directly eliminated from the respiratory tract and will appear bright red, which is the fresh blood left by the ruptured blood vessels. If the internal bleeding is caused by severe damage to the lung tissue due to a tumor or bleeding from distal small blood vessels, the blood often cannot be eliminated from the respiratory tract quickly and will be slowly eliminated from the body through circulation. Since the elimination process takes a long time, the blood will appear dark red when it is coughed up.

So can we judge whether the condition has worsened by the change in blood color?

Generally speaking, there is no way to judge. Because the process of bleeding being eliminated from the respiratory tract is relatively complicated, many factors can affect this process, such as body posture, exercise conditions, etc. If the amount of coughed up blood increases or even hemoptysis occurs (coughing up large amounts of blood, more than 500 ml), and the frequency increases significantly, it is recommended to go to the hospital for treatment as soon as possible.