Hello and welcome to the zero to finals podcast.

My name is Tom and in this episode I'm going to be talking to you about interstitial lung disease.

If you want to follow along with written notes on this topic, you can follow along at zero to finals.com

slash interstitial lung disease or in the respiratory section of the zero definals medicine book.

Let's get straight into it.

Interstitial lung disease is really an umbrella term that's used to describe conditions that affect

the lung paranchimer, which is the lung tissue.

And these conditions cause inflammation and fibrosis of the lung tissue.

Fibrosis involves the replacement of the normal elastic and functional tissue of the lungs

with scar tissue that's stiff and doesn't function effectively.

It's important to talk about how we diagnose interstitial lung

disease and the diagnosis is really made based on a combination of clinical features and a high

resolution CT scan of the thorax. So a high resolution CT scan will show a ground glass appearance

with interstitial lung disease.

And when the diagnosis is unclear, a lung biopsy can be used to take samples of the lung

tissue and confirm the diagnosis using histology or analysis of the cells under a microscope.

Generally, how do we manage interstitial lung disease? Well, generally there's

quite a poor prognosis and there's limited management options in interstitial lung disease,

as the damage is irreversible. So fibrosis of lung tissue is generally irreversible.

The treatment is supportive and where possible we need to prevent further progression

of the disease. So some options for supportive management and preventing further progression

is to remove or treat the underlying cause. So if it's medication, stop those medications.

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