The best way to prevent chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) is to not smoke. If you need help quitting, talk to your doctor.

Although COPD is not curable, prompt treatment and careful monitoring can slow its progression and lessen the possibility of heart damage.

If you have COPD and you smoke, the most important thing you can do is quit now. It’s never too late. Quitting will help prevent your lung damage from getting worse.

There are a variety of medications and other aids that can help you quit.

But if you are suffering symptoms of COPD, quitting smoking is not enough. You also need to make sure to follow up with a pulmonary specialist so the disease can be properly diagnosed and treated.

Treatments include:

• Inhalers (bronchodilators) to help open airways

• Inhaled or oral steroids to reduce lung inflammation

• Anti-inflammatory drugs to reduce swelling in the airways

In severe cases or during flare-ups, you may need to receive:

• Steroids by mouth or through a vein (intravenously)

• Bronchodilators through a nebulizer

• Assistance during breathing from a machine (a mask, BiPAP, or endotracheal tube)

Patients can also benefit from simple oxygen therapy. Heart damage occurs when your cardiac muscle needs to strain to receive oxygen, so the use of oxygen is very important.

Just like heart disease, COPD and nonalcoholic fatty liver disease represent grave threats to health.

But these diseases, which cause death and disability, are not brought on by outside forces, such as viruses, but by our own choices — eating fatty, sugary foods, not exercising, and engaging in risky habits like smoking.

Those elective factors combine make these conditions serious threats to health and well-being.

But there is a bright side. Taking the first steps toward a heart-healthy lifestyle, and changing the way you eat, becoming active, and banishing bad habits can prevent these dangerous conditions.