INTERSTITIAL LUNG DISEASE (ILD) 101 What is ILD? ‍️ ILD is also known as diffuse

[00:00:00]What exactly is interstitial lung disease or diffuse parenchymal lung disease? This is a disease that affects the actual lung tissue or lung parenchyma, unlike diseases of the airways like asthma or diseases of the pleura like a pleural effusion or empyema. Now, if you find interstitial lung disease or ILD confusing, I don't blame you. This is a broad bucket of diseases. Some of them present very rapidly, some of them present over years. A good way to classify them is to look at them by their cause. Some causes of ILD are known and some are unknown.

[00:00:34]The most common known causes of ILD are connective tissue disease associated ILD, which includes things like rheumatoid arthritis causing ILD, scleroderma causing ILD, lupus.

[00:00:46]Sometimes another known cause of ILD can be drug exposures like certain chemotherapies or antibiotics or amiodarone.

[00:00:54]And then there can be other kinds of exposures that can lead to ILD. For example, inhaling various inorganic substances or having a post-infectious ILD like after COVID pneumonia or getting exposed to high levels of radiation or certain occupational exposures. Now, when we talk about the most common unknown causes of ILD, we're looking at things such as granulomatous lung diseases like sarcoidosis. We're looking at a group of diseases called the idiopathic interstitial pneumonias.

[00:01:25]Basically, pneumonias that we don't really know what causes them. We're looking at idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis.

[00:01:31]And then we're looking at something called hypersensitivity pneumonitis, which is basically an immune reaction to either a known or unknown substance. So, when you think of ILD, think of diseases that affect the actual lung tissue and think of it in terms of known exposures like drugs, connective tissue diseases, radiation, smoking or unknown causes leading to ILD like sarcoidosis and the idiopathic interstitial pneumonias.