<p>The Long-Term Burden of COPD Exacerbations During Maintenance Therapy and Lung Function Decline</p>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Introduction: Early identification of preventable risk factors of COPD progression is important. Whether exacerbations have a negative impact on disease progression is largely unknown. We investigated whether the long-term occurrence of exacerbations is associated with lung function decline at early stages of COPD. Methods: Patients diagnosed with mild/moderate COPD (obstruction and FEV 1 % predicted 50– 90%), aged ≥ 35 years, and a smoking history, who had ≥ 6 years of UK electronic medical records after initiation of maintenance therapy were studied. Multilevel mixed-effect linear regression was performed to determine the association between the count of any year in which the patient had ≥ 1 exacerbation over a 6-year period and FEV 1 decline, adjusted for sex, age, anthropometrics and smoking habits. Exacerbations were defined as any prescription for an acute oral corticosteroid course and/or lower respiratory-related antibiotics and/or any COPD-related emergency or inpatient hospitalization. Results: Of 11,337 patients included (mean age 65 years; 49% female) 31.6%, 23.3%, 16.6%, 11.6%, 8.1%, 5.3% and 3.4% had 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6 years with ≥ 1 exacerbation. The mean annual FEV 1 decline accelerated by 1.50 mL/year (95% Confidence Interval 1.02; 1.98) with every additional year with ≥ 1 exacerbation from 31.0 mL/year in subjects without any exacerbation to 40.0 mL/year in patients experiencing ≥ 1 exacerbation every year. Patients with more years with ≥ 1 exacerbation had a lower mean FEV 1 at first diagnosis: 14.7 mL (11.7; 17.8) lower with every additional year with exacerbations. When counting years with ≥ 2 exacerbations, greater effects were observed (2.19 [1.50; 2.88] mL/year excess decline per year with ≥ 2 exacerbations; 16.5 mL [12.1; 20.8] lower FEV 1 at diagnosis). Conclusion: Patients who experienced a greater exacerbation burden after initiation of maintenance therapy had worse lung function at diagnosis and a more rapid lung function decline thereafter, which emphasizes the need for better treatment strategies. Keywords: COPD, exacerbations, spirometry, inhalation therapy, observational study
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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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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".