What is the difference between wheezing and crackles

However, abnormal breath sounds may include:. Your doctor can use a medical instrument called a stethoscope to hear breath sounds. They can hear the breath sounds by placing the stethoscope on your chest, back, or rib cage, or under your collarbone. Abnormal breath sounds are usually indicators of problems in the lungs or airways. The most common causes of abnormal breath sounds are:. Go to the emergency room or call local emergency services if breathing difficulty comes on suddenly, is severe, or if someone stops breathing.

Cyanosis , a bluish color of skin and mucous membranes due to lack of oxygen, can occur along with abnormal breath sounds.

Cyanosis involving the lips or the face is also a medical emergency. Tell your doctor when you noticed the abnormal sounds and what you were doing before you heard them. Be sure to mention any other symptoms you may be experiencing. These tests can include:. A sputum culture is a test for detecting foreign organisms in the mucus of the lungs, such as abnormal bacteria or fungi.

For this test, your doctor asks you to cough and then collects the sputum you cough up. This sample is then sent to a lab for analysis.

Treatment options for abnormal breath sounds depend on your diagnosis. Your doctor takes the cause and the severity of your symptoms into consideration when recommending a treatment. Medications are often prescribed to clear up infections or to open the airways. However, in severe cases, such as fluid in the lungs or an obstruction in the airways, hospitalization may be necessary. If you have asthma, COPD , or bronchitis, your doctor will probably prescribe breathing treatments to open the airways.

An asthmatic lung airway is similar because it is constricted to a small narrow passageway. The pitch you hear is the frequency of oscillation of the balloon material, which for a lung would be the airway tube made of cells. Grotberg: Vibrating the lung cells makes them promote inflammation which damages the lung. Asthma already involves inflammation of the airway tubes in the lung, so wheezing likely just makes things worse.

Grotberg: Crackles are ruptures of liquid plugs in the smaller airway tubes that pop open during inspiration. The sound mechanism is very similar to drinking through a straw when you get down to the last sips at the bottom of the cup.

The gurgling is a mixture of liquid and air with popping bubbles, just like a fluid-overloaded lung. Grotberg: Well, this is completely new territory. Since no one has ever viewed lung sounds as a cause of disease, they have not been investigating it. Experimental models need to be designed to include measurement of injury, from cellular to whole organ level, along with measurement of sound. Our research group in collaboration with Shuichi Takayama, a former U-M professor of biomedical engineering now at Georgia Tech, has done that for crackles in microfluidic platforms, but that is just a beginning.

If lung crackle injury is found in congestive heart failure, therapy would likely change to treat both at the same time, perhaps adding an anti-inflammatory agent. Wheezing is often already treated with anti-inflammatory agents, but not always. It will be printed in a forthcoming issue. Sibilant wheezes differ to sonorous wheezes as they are a higher-pitched, shrill, continuous whistling sound, occurring when the airway becomes obstructed and narrowed. These are the typical wheezes heard when listening to an asthmatic patient.

Sibilant wheezes are caused by asthma, chronic bronchitis and obstructive pulmonary disease COPD. Crackles are also known as alveolar rales and are the sounds heard in a lung field that has fluid in the small airways. The sound crackles create are fine, short, high-pitched, intermittently crackling sounds. The cause of crackles can be from air passing through fluid, pus or mucus.

It is commonly heard in the bases of the lung lobes during inspiration. The sound quality of fine crackles is similar to the sound of hair rubbed between your fingers near the ear and may be heard in congestive heart failure and pulmonary fibrosis.

Coarse crackles are lower-pitched and moist-sounding, like pouring water out of a bottle or ripping open velcro. This lung sound is often a sign of adult respiratory distress syndrome ARDS , early congestive heart failure, asthma and pulmonary oedema. Stridor is a continuous, high-pitched, crowing sound heard predominantly on inspiration, over the upper airway. Stridor may be a sign of a life-threatening condition and should be treated as an emergency situation.

It usually indicates the partial obstruction of the larger airways, such as the trachea or a main bronchus, and requires immediate attention. It is also the most common type of breath sound heard in children with croup, though it is important to differentiate between croup and a foreign body airway obstruction.