Abstract :
Background: Asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) are different disease entities. They are both clinical diagnoses, with diagnostic tools to discriminate between one another. There is a need to re-evaluate the concept of asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) as separate conditions, and to consider situations when they may coexist, or when one condition may evolve into the other.
Materials and Methods: A prospective study included 70 patients with chronic airway diseases who were classified into three groups (COPD, asthma and ACO). They were selected from Department of Pulmonary Medicine, Kurnool Medical College outpatient clinic during the period from January 2019 to December 2019, where patients with COPD and ACO were diagnosed according to GOLD guidelines and patients with asthma were diagnosed according to GINA guidelines. Patients enrolled in the study were subjected to full history taking, clinical examination, full laboratory examination, plain chest radiography, spirometry
before bronchodilator and after bronchodilator administration (reversibility test) and sputum analysis for counting eosinophils cells.
Results: This study was conducted on 70 patients with chronic airway diseases (COPD, asthma and asthma COPD overlap) were selected. It included 47(67.1%) males and 23(32.8%) females. In our study, 30(42.8%) patients as having COPD, 19(27.1%) patients were diagnosed as having asthma and 21(30%) patients were diagnosed as having ACO. Regarding the age difference between groups, it was found that patients who were diagnosed as having ACO were older than asthmatic patients with mean age of 49.43±5.83 and 47.23±6.73years, respectively. The men age of patients with COPD was 57.32±6.74 which was older than both ACO and asthmatic patients.
Conclusion: ACO represents a large percentage among patients with obstructive airway diseases. It shares some features of asthma such as atopy and positive sputum eosinophilia, and some features of COPD like old age of presentation and positive smoking history.
Keyword :
Asthma and Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, Obstructive airway diseases.