Chest
Clinical Investigations: OxyzenHome Oxygen Therapy: A Comparison of 2- vs 6-Month Patient Reevaluation
Section snippets
Patient Selection
All patients seen at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center-Pittsburgh (VAMC) have a physician responsible for their care and are followed up in an assigned clinic. Although any physician may refer a patient for home oxygen evaluation, this facility has limited the authority to prescribe home oxygen to the Pulmonary Service. The evaluation is performed in a standardized fashion by a pulmonary nurse specialist. If the patient meets the NOTT arterial blood gas criteria (Table 1), HOT is prescribed.
RESULTS
Except for a paucity of female patients, our population would seem to be quite comparable to the NOTT group (Table 2). In our study, the “all cause” 1-year mortality was 16%. Although 21 (42%) of our subjects had no hospitalizations in the study period, 9 (18%) had three or more hospitalizations (the vast majority of which were related to respiratory problems). The mean number of hospital days per year for those patients requiring hospital admission was 17. The study population had a
DISCUSSION
The only statistically significant clinical outcome difference that we discovered between the 2- and 6-month groups involved the SIP where there was a significant improvement in the 2-month group, but not in the 6-month group when baseline values were compared with those at 1-year follow-up. This improvement was solely attributable to an improvement in the psychosocial subscore. The importance of this finding is unclear. It may be attributed to chance or it may reflect true psychologic benefit
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Cited by (0)
This work was funded by VA grant HSR&D 87–033, NHLBI grant T32 HL07563, and the American Lung Association of Western Pennsylvania.
Reprint requests: Dr. Cottrell, Department of Veterans Affairs Medical Center, University Drive C, Pittsburgh, PA 15240