Chest
ORIGINAL RESEARCHCOPDBody Mass and Fat-Free Mass Indices in COPD: Relation With Variables Expressing Disease Severity
Section snippets
Patients
Four hundred twenty clinically stable COPD patients, all current smokers, were screened through the outpatient clinic of Veterans Hospital during a period of 1 year in order to select 100 patients and to form similar groups of each stage of the GOLD classification.8 Inclusion criteria were medication according to the stage of their disease, no self-reported asthma or reversibility > 12% of airway obstruction after administration of a β2-agonist, and no participation to a rehabilitation program
Correlations
Patient Characteristics are summarized in Table 1. Correlation data for the whole study group are summarized in Table 2. Briefly, BMI was weakly correlated with exercise capacity as assessed by 6MWD (Fig 1, left, A). FFMI presented significant correlations with 6MWD (Fig 1, right, B), MRC dyspnea, and airway obstruction and limitation as assessed with FEV1/FVC ratio and FEV1%pred, respectively. Stepwise linear regression analysis showed that 6MWD and MRC were the best predictors of FFMI,
Discussion
Our study, which included COPD patients with a wide range of severity, shows that FFMI provides information beyond BMI regarding variables expressing disease severity and exercise capacity, and should be considered in the routine assessment of patients with COPD. FFMI seems to be more accurate in predicting the recent staging of the disease compared to BMI.
Our study showed that FFMI values were higher in those stages where no or minimal airflow limitation and obstruction exists. The above
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Cited by (0)
This work was performed at the Department of Pneumonology, Veterans Hospital of Athens, Greece.
The authors have no conflicts of interest to disclose.