Could COPD be reversible with earlier diagnosis?

Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) is a common condition and a leading cause of sickness and mortality across the world. COPD is a progressive disease, which means that it will get worse over time. Currently there are no disease-modifying therapies for COPD – treatment focuses on managing and relieving symptoms. 

People are being diagnosed too late 

Unfortunately, we don’t know much about the biological mechanisms that are involved in how COPD develops, because most people are diagnosed as older adults when their lungs are already significantly and irreversibly damaged. If we can learn more about how COPD develops, this would help us to proactively recognise the disease at a much earlier stage. COPD could potentially be reversible at this earlier stage, when treatment could prevent the damage becoming irreversible. This could lead to millions of people across the world living healthier and happier lives, for longer. It could also reduce their healthcare needs and the associated economic costs. 

A step forward in our understanding 

Using national UK data, which followed a cohort of individuals throughout their lives, Dr Allinson found that chronic bronchitis between ages 36 and 43 years appears to be an early marker of established COPD development. As smoking is a key risk factor for COPD development, Dr Allinson and his colleagues followed a cohort of 550 young adult smokers over three years. Over this time, they collected information on their symptoms, sputum samples and physiological measurements, along with CT scans of the lungs from the young smokers. This is the first robust dataset of its kind. By analysing this data, sputum samples and CT scans from this cohort we can start to characterise the early stage of COPD development associated with chronic bronchitis. 

We can help people live longer, happier lives 

If we can understand early-stage COPD, we’ll be able to better identify individuals before their disease becomes established and irreversible. We could help people make targeted lifestyle changes to reduce the risk of it progressing. And our analysis of the appearance of the lung and the composition of sputum in early disease could reveal targets for new therapies. This would lay the groundwork for new treatments to stop COPD in its tracks. That would mean we could keep people’s lungs healthier and help them have a better quality of life for longer. 

And our understanding of the early, formative stages of COPD could give us valuable insights into lung ageing in response to exposure to things like smoking and other damaging environmental factors. This could benefit other areas of lung health research beyond COPD. 

Highlighting the importance of early diagnosis 

This work highlights the importance of early and accurate diagnosis. Better treatments and cures can only come with a full understanding of lung conditions, and a full understanding of lung diseases like COPD relies on us being able to study them in their early stages. Delays in diagnosis not only increases the suffering of the people affected – potentially cutting their lives short - it also prevents us from finding new ways to treat and cure lung conditions.