Respiratory Medicine
Respiratory Medicine
5 years ago

The prevalence of COPD in England: An ontological approach to case detection in primary care

Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) is a significant cause of morbidity and mortality in England, however estimates of its prevalence vary considerably. Routinely collected and coded primary care data can be used to monitor disease prevalence, however reliance upon diagnostic codes alone is likely to miss cases. Methods We devised an ontological approach to COPD case detection and implemented it in a large primary care database to identify definite and probable cases of COPD. We used this to estimate the prevalence of COPD in England. Results Use of this approach to detect definite COPD cases yielded a prevalence of 2.57% (95% CI 2.55–2.60) in the total population, 4.56% (95%CI 4.52–4.61) in those aged ≥ 35 and 5.41% (95% CI 5.36–5.47) in ex or current smokers. The ontological approach identified an additional 10,543 definite cases compared with using diagnostic codes alone. Prevalence estimates were higher than the 1.9% prevalence currently reported by the UK primary care pay for performance (P4P) disease register. COPD prevalence when definite and probable cases were combined was 3.02% (95% CI 3.0–3.05) in the total population, 5.38% (95% CI 5.33–5.42) in those aged ≥ 35 and 6.46% (95% CI 6.46-6.40-6.56) in ex or current smokers. Conclusions We demonstrate a robust reproducible method for COPD case detection in routinely collected primary care data. Our calculated prevalence differed significantly from current estimates based upon P4P data, suggesting that the burden of COPD in England is greater than currently predicted.

Publisher URL: www.sciencedirect.com/science

DOI: S0954611117303633

You might also like
Discover & Discuss Important Research

Keeping up-to-date with research can feel impossible, with papers being published faster than you'll ever be able to read them. That's where Researcher comes in: we're simplifying discovery and making important discussions happen. With over 19,000 sources, including peer-reviewed journals, preprints, blogs, universities, podcasts and Live events across 10 research areas, you'll never miss what's important to you. It's like social media, but better. Oh, and we should mention - it's free.

  • Download from Google Play
  • Download from App Store
  • Download from AppInChina

Researcher displays publicly available abstracts and doesn’t host any full article content. If the content is open access, we will direct clicks from the abstracts to the publisher website and display the PDF copy on our platform. Clicks to view the full text will be directed to the publisher website, where only users with subscriptions or access through their institution are able to view the full article.