EDITORIALS
Use of β blockers in patients with COPD
Correspondence to:
Dr D H Au, Health Services Research and Development, VA Puget Sound Health Care System, Suite 1400, 1100 Olive Way, Seattle, WA 98101; dau@u.washington.edu
| The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below. |
Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) is the leading cause of respiratory-related deaths in the USA.1 This simple and dramatic statistic, however, does not present the full story. In developed countries, smoking tobacco is the principal cause of COPD and also represents a major risk factor for other conditions such as cardiovascular disease and lung cancer.2 One question that remains largely unanswered is how the presence of COPD modifies the treatment of coexisting illnesses such as cardiovascular disease. This question is important because most patients with COPD do not die of COPD but, as demonstrated by randomised trials and observational studies, the principal causes of death are most often listed as cardiovascular-related or lung cancer-related.3–5 Tension in treatment decisions often occurs when clinicians must decide about providing patients with treatments that are known to improve outcomes for selected patients while potentially causing harm in others. A paradigm for this dilemma is
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