Even If You Have Severe Lung Disease, You Can Safely Wear a Mask

• A study found that even people with severe COPD can safely wear masks.
• Experts emphasize that discomfort from masks shouldn’t turn into unfounded health worries.
• The discomfort some people feel using a surgical mask can be due to anxiety or claustrophobia.

It can be inconvenient, uncomfortable, and a hassle if you forget to bring it with you shopping — but one thing a face mask is not, is dangerous.

That’s what researchers found in the most recent study looking at how face masks do (or do not) affect the ability to breathe, even in people with lung disease.

Researchers conducted the study, published earlier this month in the Annals of the American Thoracic Society, after a group of Florida residents challenged Florida’s mask-wearing mandate in June.

They argued that wearing a face covering could cause carbon dioxide (CO2) to build up and impair normal respiration.

“Everyone rebreathes a small amount of their own CO2 with each breath,” Minh Quang Nghi, DO, of Texas Health Physicians Group, who was not associated with the study, told Healthline. “Exhaled air, although containing some CO2, still contains a good amount of breathable air.”

He explained this is how rescue breathing is accomplished with CPR and that “a mask would not trap enough in the measured level of CO2 to cause a clinically significant change [poisoning].”

Protest-inspired research

“Several of my colleagues, including me, were seriously annoyed with people not using face masks for different reasons in the middle of a pandemic that was steadily spreading,” said Dr. Michael Campos, lead study author and pulmonologist at Miami VA Medical Center and the University of Miami Hospital and Clinics.

According to Campos, after Palm Beach County, Florida, residents protested mask mandates at a commissioner’s meeting, he looked up studies proving that surgical masks don’t impede breathing ability — and found none existed.

So he decided to prove it himself.