Published in News
The first known global systematic review of COPD guidelines has been published in CHEST, led by Dr Job van Boven, involving a collaborative effort from the GACD Research Network.
Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) is the name for a group of lung conditions that cause breathing difficulties, often caused by smoking or long-term exposure to fumes or dust.
According to the Global Burden of Disease study, more than 90% of COPD deaths occur in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), threatening to become a new epidemic. Every loss of life to COPD will be a sorrow but may also have significant wider socioeconomic repercussions for the patients’ families and wider society in LMICs.
To optimize the provision of care for people living with COPD, clinical guidelines that provide standardised, evidence-based prevention, diagnosis, and management recommendations must be available and implemented appropriately in LMICs. However, little has been known about their availability and use in a majority of these countries until now.
The first known global systematic review of COPD guidelines has been published in CHEST, led by Dr Job van Boven, involving a collaborative effort from the GACD Research Network.
The review uncovered several gaps in COPD guidelines in LMICs, including how just 30 of the world’s 137 LMICs have any guidelines at all. In terms of people, this means nearly 30% of people (over a quarter of the world’s population) in LMICs do not have their own national guidelines, compared to just 2% of people from high-income countries (HICs).
Clinical guidelines in LMICs were also found to target fewer healthcare professional groups and were less likely to address the additional medical conditions that people may have. While 90% of all guidelines included smoking cessation advice, prevention of other risk factors (for example air pollution) and early life disadvantages were less frequently mentioned in guidelines from all countries.
An editorial of the paper stresses that those engaged in developing guidelines for LMICs in the future should do more than simply reproduce guidelines from HICs. Robust and implementable COPD guidelines will be those tailored to the particular social, economic, and ethical needs of individual countries. Such guidelines will be more likely to make COPD care more equitable and accessible to those most impacted by the illness.
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Find out more about the GACD projects tackling lung diseases here.