SAN DIEGO — You can't treat patients if you can't find them.
"The simple problem is that 70% of individuals with asthma or COPD are likely undiagnosed," Aaron said. Asthma and COPD both present with similar respiratory symptoms, including dyspnea, cough, wheeze, and/or chest tightness, and the two conditions share expiratory airflow obstruction as a common physiologic impairment that can be detected with spirometry.
In the intervention group treatment was provided by a study pulmonologist and asthma-COPD educator who started guideline-based care. Patients were prescribed inhalers and were taught how to use them, and many were given action plans that included smoking cessation aids, exercise and weight counseling, and vaccinations againstDuring the 12 months of the study, 92% of patients in the intervention group and 60% in the control group were started on new medications for their condition.
In fact, many patients in the control group decided to seek treatment for either asthma or COPD after learning of their diagnosis, which may have contributed to improved outcomes in the control arm, he said. "This idea of seeking out undiagnosed people by doing spirometry, so-called 'case finding' as they described it, testing highly symptomatic people with spirometry, is really challenging in the US, because symptoms are not collected proactively very much," he said.