The purpose of this study was to explore the strategy of detection and management of mild and early COPD. We constructed 2 patient cohorts for evaluation of health care utilization for early and mild COPD. One is comprised of patients who were newly d...
The purpose of this study was to explore the strategy of detection and management of mild and early COPD. We constructed 2 patient cohorts for evaluation of health care utilization for early and mild COPD. One is comprised of patients who were newly diagnosed with COPD from the Korean National Health and Nutritional Examination Survey (KNHANES cohort). And the other is the Korea COPD Subtype Study (KOCOSS) cohort, in which the patients were already treated for COPD. We compared health care utilization and medical cost between the 2 cohorts using the Korean Health Insurance Review and Assessment Service database for 6years from 2007 to 2012. KNHANES cohort consists of 2,172 early COPD patients (FEV1≥ 60% of predicted value). KOCOSS cohort enrolled 210 early COPD patients. The mean durations of COPD admission in 2007 were 9.8±7.1 days in KNHANES cohort and 20.3±23.1 days in KOCOSS cohort, respectively. In terms of total medical cost, 278.2 USD in KNANES cohort and 517.6 USD in KOCOSS cohort were spent, respectively in 2007. In 2012, KNANES cohort stayed hospital longer than KOCOSS cohort (18.0±21.3 vs. 16.0±16.9 days) The medical cost of each cohort was almost same in amount (793.7 USD for KNHANES cohort vs. 853.4 USD for KOCOSS cohort). We evaluated the usefulness COPD6 as a screening test for COPD. We enrolled 192 smokers with at least one respiratory symptom (cough, sputum and dyspnea). A total of 23.7% of subjects were diagnoesd as COPD with spirometry. COPD6 using 77% of FEV1/FVE6 as cut off value had 72.7% of sensitivity and 77.1% of specificity. COPD6 might be a good screening tool for early detection of COPD.