Pneumonia Symptoms: Call Your Doctor Immediately If You Notice This

Written by BEA KARNES (Patch Staff)

Everywhere you go, it seems as if someone is coughing or sneezing. Colds and flu are already going around--and it isn’t even winter yet.

If you’re coughing, sniffly and achy, how do you know if you’re suffering from a simple cold or pneumonia? Pneumonia can come on quickly, with deadly consequences. In fact, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reports that about one million Americans are hospitalized with pneumonia each year, with 50,000 reported deaths.

Health care provider Kaiser Permanente provides this list of symptoms to patients:

• Cough. You will likely cough up mucus (sputum) from your lungs. Mucus may be rusty or green or tinged with blood
• Fever
• Fast breathing and feeling short of breath
• Shaking and “teeth-chattering” chills
• Chest pain that often feels worse when you cough or breathe in
• Fast heartbeat
• Feeling very tired or very weak
• Nausea and vomiting
• Diarrhea

What if you have some of those symptoms, but not all of them? Patch asked Dr. Randy Bergen, infectious disease specialist for Kaiser Permanente, what is the one symptom that should send you to the phone immediately to call your doctor? He first explained the different types of pneumonia, “With both viral and bacterial pneumonia they occur in the same way as are any type of respiratory viral or bacterial infection. Viral respiratory infections are caught from the air, surfaces, and other people directly through contact.

“Respiratory viruses usually start in the nose and throat mucous tissue but can spread. Spreading down to the lungs is sometimes just bad luck but can be more common if there are risk factors like smoking or asthma -- then you have a viral pneumonia.

“Bacteria is a bit different. Bacterial pneumonia is usually secondary to the viral infection. The bacteria we usually get from others as well but they rarely go directly to an infection in the lungs , they “hang out or colonize” our mucous tissue and wait for the opportunity to cause an infection. That opportunity usually is created by a viral infection in the same area. Then those bacteria which are in the environment can begin to get a foothold and cause an infection. It is not clear that being out in the rain or not wearing a cap is a direct contributor but anything that weakens your immune system can give you a greater risk of getting a pneumonia.”

When to call the doctor immediately

With so many different symptoms, what is the one thing that should prompt you to seek immediate attention? According to Dr. Bergen, “Trouble breathing or a returning fever. The initial fever is usually the virus but if the fever is gone and then a high fever returns after no fever for 2 days or more, then you worry more about a secondary bacterial infection.”

New treatment for pneumonia

The good news is that proper treatment can shorten the course of pneumonia. Several studies have shown that pneumonia patients treated with corticosteroids had fewer complications, and were released from the hospital one day earlier. See more in the above video.

--Photo via Shutterstock