Randomized controlled trials of pharmacological treatments to prevent COPD exacerbations: applicability to real-life patients.

ABSTRACT:

Background

In patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, all efforts should be made to prevent exacerbations because each event modifies the trajectory of the disease. Treatment recommendations are mostly built on results from randomized controlled trials (RCTs) whose methodology ensure internal validity. However, their relevance may be compromised by the lack of generalizability, due to poor representability of study populations compared to real-life patients. In order to delimit to whom the results of studies on current and future treatments apply, we sought to identify and characterize the fraction of COPD population that would be eligible for inclusion into RCTs aiming at decreasing exacerbation risk.

Methods

We used the Initiatives-BPCO database, a French coho

SUBMITTER: Pahus L 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6625055 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature