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What defines abnormal lung function?
  1. Martin R Miller
  1. Department of Medicine, University Hospital Birmingham NHS Trust, Birmingham B29 6JD, UK; martin.miller{at}uhb.nhs.uk

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A major concern with the GOLD criteria for defining chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) is that the use of 70% as a fixed cut-off for forced expiratory volume in 1 s (FEV1) will add a significant number of false positives compared with the use of a true lower limit of normal.1 2 The recent paper in Thorax by Mannino et al3 argues that this false positive rate is acceptable because they found that these false positive subjects had an increased hazard of death when compared with those …

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  • Competing interests: None.