Effect of theophylline on the rate of moderate to severe exacerbations among patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease
Bibliographic record
Abstract
WHAT IS ALREADY KNOWN ABOUT THIS SUBJECT • Despite active research, none of the existing medications used to treat chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) has been shown to modify the long‐term decline in lung function. • Theophyllines have been recognized for their bronchodilating effects and anti‐inflammatory properties, but at the same time they are associated with the risk of adverse events due to their narrow therapeutic range and potential for drug interactions. • To our knowledge, no study has investigated the effects of theophylline on outcomes that can reflect the overall morbidity of COPD patients. WHAT THIS STUDY ADDS • The use of theophyllines is associated with a reduction in the rate of COPD exacerbations compared with long‐acting β 2 ‐agonists among COPD patients. • Theophyllines could be seen as an interesting alternative in the treatment of COPD, because they are much less expensive than long‐acting β 2 ‐agonists, and, from the patient's perspective, an oral formulation might be easier to take than an inhaled formulation. AIM To determine the effectiveness of theophyllines in real clinical practice on moderate to severe exacerbations. METHODS A cohort of 36 492 chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) patients aged ≥50 years was reconstructed from the health administrative databases of the province of Quebec, Canada, between 1 January 1995 and 31 December 2002 to compare users of theophyllines with users of inhaled corticosteroids (ICS) and users of long‐acting β 2 ‐agonists (LABA) on their rate of moderate to severe COPD exacerbations. RESULTS Users of theophyllines were found to be less likely than users of LABA [crude rates 84 vs. 91 per 100 patient‐years, adjusted rate ratio (RR) 0.89, 95% confidence interval (CI) 0.84, 0.95] and users of theophyllines plus ICS were found to be less likely than users of LABA plus ICS (crude rates 114 vs. 112 per 100 patient‐years, adjusted RR 0.89, 95% CI 0.87, 0.92) to have moderate to severe COPD exacerbations. Users of theophyllines were found to be more likely than users of ICS to have a COPD exacerbation (crude rates 84 vs. 77 per 100 patient‐years, adjusted RR 1.07, 95% CI 1.04, 1.10), and this association was even stronger among patients who had at least three exacerbations in the year prior to cohort entry (crude rates 273 vs. 213 per 100 patient‐years, adjusted RR 1.28, 95% CI 1.19, 1.38). CONCLUSION The use of theophyllines was found to be associated with a reduction in the rate of COPD exacerbations among all COPD patients, but to be less effective than ICS among patients with frequent exacerbations.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".