TY - JOUR T1 - The ABCD of GOLD made clear JF - European Respiratory Journal JO - Eur Respir J SP - 1163 LP - 1165 DO - 10.1183/09031936.00117413 VL - 42 IS - 5 AU - Peter M.A. Calverley Y1 - 2013/11/01 UR - http://erj.ersjournals.com/content/42/5/1163.abstract N2 - Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) remains a major public health problem. We know this with some certainty from the recently published Global Burden of Disease Study [1], a remarkable analysis of 235 causes of death in 21 regions of the world over a 30-year period. These data show that COPD will rise from the fourth most common cause of death in 1990 to the third by 2020. This gloomy prognostication fits with US data showing a progressive age-specific rise in mortality from COPD in both males and females over the last 50 years [2]. The challenge that COPD presents has been met by a dramatic increase in COPD-related research papers, which range from studies identifying airway loss in spirometrically mild disease [3], to improvements in case finding using the peak expiratory flows as screening tool [4], and to new anti-inflammatory drugs and bronchodilators to diminish the symptom burden of this condition [5–7]. Marshalling this mass of information into a clinically useful format for patient care has fallen to those clinicians and methodologists who develop treatment guidelines and there is no shortage of these in the field of COPD. The first COPD guidelines were produced by both national and international societies with the joint American Thoracic Society (ATS)/European Respiratory Society (ERS) document [8] proving to be particularly influential. However, the rise of evidence-based medicine has had the unanticipated effect of decreasing the scope of guidance for COPD, which is now almost entirely focused on the relative merits of drug treatment as this is where the most robust clinical trial data are available [9].One group, the Global Initiative for Chronic Obstructive … ER -