Aspiration Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words

Aspiration - Essay Example Aspiration could be consequential and come with the risk of leading to a type of pneumonia known as aspiration pneumonia. Aspiration is generally being identified to be common in some people than others. For example, patients who suffer dysphagia stand a higher risk of being affected with aspiration and on a very regular basis. Dysphagia could pose a risk to patients because it is the difficulty in swallowing and such difficulty commonly leads to misplacement of food or fluid particles. It is also said that the male to female ratio of risk is 2:1 (Medscape, 2012). What this means is that there are more males who are at risk to aspiration than females. It is for this reason that the control of aspiration is an important issue to health practitioners. Symptoms of aspiration are varying and often dependent on the level of risk. Most commonly however, aspiration will be characterized by coughing, choking, fever, chills, leakage of food from mouth, shortness of breath and wet voice after swallowing (University of Wisconsin, 2012) The National Safety Council is quoted as stating that choking is the forth leading cause of unintentional injury death (Medscape, 2012). There are other critical effects that adults and other sufferers of aspiration face. Some of these include a permanent expansion of one’s lungs or trachea (Selius and Subedi, 2008). Once such permanent damages take place, the resorting long term consequence is that there could be the development of dyspahgia, which in its self is a risk factor to getting aspiration. Practitioners often want to use the term conservative management because they have a feeling that aspiration is best treated when taken care of at the initial stage. To this effect, some of the treatments prescribed include the need to place children in upright positions, not putting children in seated position after ninety minues of feeding, raising head of bed to 300,