Respiratory Failure - Causes - Causes

Any condition or injury that affects breathing can cause respiratory failure. The condition or injury may affect your airways or lungs. Or it may affect the muscles, nerves, and bones that help you breathe.

When you can't breathe well, your lungs can’t easily move oxygen into your blood or remove carbon dioxide. This causes a low oxygen or high carbon dioxide level in your blood. Learn more about how your lungs normally exchange oxygen and carbon dioxide in this video.

Respiratory failure can be caused by:

• Conditions that make it difficult to breathe in and get air into your lungs. Examples include weakness following a stroke, collapsed airways, and food getting stuck in and blocking your windpipe.
• Conditions that make it difficult for you to breathe out. Asthma causes your airways to narrow, while COPD can cause mucus to buildup and narrow your airways, which can make it hard for you to breathe out.
• Lung collapse. When no air is able to enter your lungs, one or both lobes may collapse and cause a condition called atelectasis. This collapsing of the lung can happen in certain situations, such as when the lungs become extremely weak, mucus blocks one of the large airways, a rib is broken or fractured, or severe pain in the lung makes it difficult to take a deep breath. Chest trauma or lung injury can also cause air to leak from the lung, filling the space around the lung within the chest. This air could cause the lung to collapse, called a pneumothorax.
• Fluid in your lungs. This makes it harder for oxygen to pass from the air sacs into your blood and for carbon dioxide in your blood to pass into the air sacs to be breathed out. Pneumonia, acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS), drowning, and other lung diseases can cause this fluid buildup. It can also be caused by the inability of the heart to pump enough blood to the lungs (called heart failure). Severe head injury or trauma can also cause sudden fluid buildup in the lungs.
• A problem with your breathing muscles. Such problems can occur after a spinal cord injury or when you have a nerve and muscle condition such as muscular dystrophy. It can also happen when your diaphragm and other breathing muscles do not get enough oxygen-rich blood, when the heart is not pumping well enough (cardiogenic shock), or when you get a severe infection called sepsis.
• Conditions that affect the brain’s control over breathing. In opioid overdose, for example, the brain may not detect high levels of carbon dioxide in the blood. Normally, the brain would signal to you to deepen your breathing so that you breathe out the carbon dioxide. Instead carbon dioxide builds up in the body, while oxygen levels fall, leading to respiratory failure.