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 pneumonia. If you want to follow along with written notes on this topic,

you can follow along at zero definals.com slash pneumonia or in the respiratory section of the

zero definals medicine book. Let's get straight into it.

Pneumonia is simply an infection in the lung tissue and it causes inflammation of the lung

tissue and sputum filling the airways and alveoli. Pneumonia can be seen as a consolidation on a chest x-ray.

So there's some basic classification we can use to distinguish between different

pneumonias.

If the pneumonia developed outside of hospital, in the community, it's labelled community

acquired pneumonia.

If it develops more than 48 hours after a hospital admission, it's labelled hospital

acquired pneumonia.

And if it develops as a result of aspiration, meaning after inhaling foreign material like

food or fluids, then it's labeled aspiration pneumonia.

So how does it present? Well, it presents as you would expect a chest infection to present,

with shortness of breath, cough and productive of sputum that might be green or brown in color,

fever, it can present with hemoptosis where they cough up

small amounts of blood. Pluritic chest pain and this is a sharp chest pain that's worse on

deep inspiration. It can present with delirium or acute confusion associated with an infection

and this is particularly common in older, more frail

patients, and it can present with features of sepsis. What are the signs when you meet and you examine

a patient with pneumonia? There's generally some derangements in basic observations, and this

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