Understanding Shortness Of Breath And Limitations In COPD

Main Category: COPD
Also Included In: Respiratory / Asthma
Article Date: 28 Apr 2009 - 5:00 PDT

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Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) is a major public health problem, and a deeper understanding of its most prominent symptom, dyspnea, may lead to improvements in the manner in which it is assessed and treated.

The objective of this study was to identify important patient-centered concepts of dyspnea and associated activities in order to develop a dyspnea-specific conceptual model for COPD.

We identified five primary areas of the dyspnea experience: breathlessness, fatigue, activity modification, activity limitation and emotional response. Major influences on dyspnea were individual exertion, exposure to environmental factors, dyspnea-related fear, needing to stop or scale back activities, taking more time to do things, and using adaptive measures or equipment.

Estimates of the number of US patients affected by COPD ranges from 10 million to 24.5 million. It is currently the fourth cause of death in the US, and a significant degree of health care utilization is attributed to it, including some 726,000 hospitalizations, 1.5 million visits to the emergency room and approximately 8 million outpatient physician visits. COPD is also a major source of disability and impaired health-related quality of life.

Says Dr. Victorson, "Such a patient-centered approach to better understanding dyspnea within the context of COPD has not been conducted, yet it is essential to evaluating disease and treatment effects. Our next step is to develop a new self report measurement tool based on these findings that will assess important components of our proposed model.

This will be discussed in Value in Health, the official journal of the International Society for Pharmacoeconomics and outcomes Research.

Value in Health (ISSN 1098-3015) publishes papers, concepts, and ideas that advance the field of pharmacoeconomics and outcomes research and help health care leaders to make decisions that are solidly evidence-based. The journal is published bi-monthly and has a regular readership of over 4,000 clinicians, decision-makers, and researchers worldwide.

ISPOR is a nonprofit, international organization that strives to translate pharmacoeconomics and outcomes research into practice to ensure that society allocates scarce health care resources wisely, fairly, and efficiently.

Source
ISPOR