Researchers have found that persons who display signs of emphysema on CT scans--even if they don't suffer from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) or airflow obstruction--have an increased mortality risk.
According to researchers led by Elizabeth Oelsner, M.D., from Columbia University in New York, about 29 percent of smokers who undergo lung cancer screening--as well as 4 percent of healthy adults who undergo cardiac screening--are found to have emphysema, which has been associated with worse outcomes for patients with COPD.
The question Oelsner and her colleagues sought answers to was how prognostically important emphysema is among those persons free of COPD.
For the study, published in the Annals of Internal Medicine, researchers looked at 2,965 patients between 45 and 84 years old with airflow obstruction or COPD. Of those patients--about half of whom never smoked--there were 186 deaths over a median of 6.2 years. Emphysema was independently associated with increased mortality, with the greatest association among smokers.
"Pulmonary emphysema is a disease that can and should be recognized on radiologic imaging of the chest since it may be associated with mortality [and, in other work, symptoms], even in the absence of COPD," Oelsner told Reuters Health. "Given that pulmonary emphysema is often understood and treated as a sub-type or corollary of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), it may seem counterintuitive to think about the prognostic significance of emphysema in the absence of COPD.
"Emphysema and COPD are defined differently, and a large amount of research supports the emerging concept that they are two related but different diseases, and that each disease can occur without the other," Oelsner added.
To learn more:
- see the study in the Annals of Internal Medicine
- see the article in Reuters Health
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