TY - JOUR T1 - Community-based recruitment of patients with COPD into clinical research JF - Thorax JO - Thorax SP - 951 LP - 952 DO - 10.1136/thoraxjnl-2014-205253 VL - 69 IS - 10 AU - Simon E Brill AU - Ethaar El-Emir AU - James P Allinson AU - Gavin C Donaldson AU - Irwin Nazareth AU - Jadwiga A Wedzicha Y1 - 2014/10/01 UR - http://thorax.bmj.com/content/69/10/951.abstract N2 - Abstract Identifying subjects for clinical trials is difficult and the evidence base for recruitment strategies is limited, particularly in the field of COPD. We compared the efficiency and patient characteristics of different community-based recruitment strategies during a non-commercial COPD trial in the UK. Recruiting from general practice COPD registers was less efficient and identified patients with significantly milder disease than recruiting through pulmonary rehabilitation and patient groups. We report our experience and propose that pulmonary rehabilitation and patient groups may represent an enriched pool of COPD patients to recruit into clinical trials. Trial registration number: EudraCT 2011-001063-43 ER -