RESEARCH ARTICLE
Adequate Patient Characterization in COPD: Reasons to Go Beyond GOLD Classification
Tewe L Verhage, Yvonne F Heijdra, Johan Molema, Leonie Daudey, P.N Richard Dekhuijzen, Jan H Vercoulen*
Article Information
Identifiers and Pagination:
Year: 2009Volume: 3
First Page: 1
Last Page: 9
Publisher ID: TORMJ-3-1
DOI: 10.2174/1874306400903010001
Article History:
Received Date: 24/11/2008Revision Received Date: 14/12/2008
Acceptance Date: 2/1/2009
Electronic publication date: 13/2/2009
Collection year: 2009
open-access license: This is an open access article licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/) which permits unrestricted, non-commercial use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the work is properly cited.
Abstract
The Global Initiative for Chronic Obstructive Lung Disease (GOLD) serves as a guide to treat and manage different severity classes of patients with COPD. It was suggested that the five categories of FEV1 % predicted (GOLD 0–4), can be applied for selecting different therapeutic approaches. However, validation of these selective properties is very poor. To determine the relevance of the GOLD staging system for estimating the severity of clinical problems, GOLD 2 (n=70) and GOLD 3 (n=65) patients were drawn from a prospective cohort of patients with COPD and evaluated crosssectionally by a newly developed Nijmegen Integral Assessment Framework (NIAF). The NIAF is a detailed assessment of a wide range of aspects of health status (HS). Significant, though small, differences were found in Static Lung Volumes, Exercise Capacity, Subjective Pulmonary Complaints, Subjective Impairment, and Health-Related QoL, besides Airflow of course. Moreover, overlap between scores of these five HS sub-domains was substantial, indicating small clinical relevance for discernment. No significant differences were found in nine other aspects of HS. It is concluded that GOLD stages do not discriminate in any aspect of HS other than airflow obstruction, and therefore do not help the clinician in deciding which treatment modalities are appropriate.
