EDITORIAL

Staging of COPD

COPD in the ECRHS

J Vestbo

Correspondence to:
Correspondence to:
Professor J Vestbo
North West Lung Centre, Wythenshawe Hospital, Southmoor Road, Manchester M23 9LT, UK; jvestbo@man.ac.uk

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More work is needed on the concept of staging of COPD

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Keywords: chronic obstructive pulmonary disease; GOLD staging; prevalence

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

As a junior doctor I once worked in a hospital where the leading consultant in medicine refused to accept the diagnosis of asthma in patients older than 40 years. To him, airflow obstruction was "asthma" in the young and "chronic bronchitis" in the elderly. While it soon became apparent that asthma does occur after the age of 40, the likelihood of significant airflow limitation occurring in young adults who have never had asthma has always seemed small to me. In this issue of Thorax De Marco et al describe the prevalence of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) in young adults taking part in the European Community Respiratory Health Survey (ECRHS).¹ They found COPD to be a considerable issue; in total, 3.6% had COPD stage I+ according to the NHLBI/WHO Global Initiative for Chronic Obstructive Lung Disease (GOLD)² and 11.8% had chronic respiratory symptoms without airflow limitation—that is, . . . [Full text of this article]

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