COPD
Dr. Lawson is Principal Investigator for a
trial of Community versus Hospital Pulmonary Rehabilitation (the
CoHoRT trial
which was funded by NHS
Research and Development. The trial continues, but produced 5 abstracts
at the COPD 5 conference and 3 at the European Respiratory Society in
2006.
Pulmonary
rehabilitation is a treatment that has been
shown to improve quality of life, increase
exercise capacity and reduce the number of days
spent in hospital in the year following
treatment for COPD patients. However, pulmonary
rehabilitation in community settings is as yet
an untested treatment as previous trials have
been almost exclusively hospital based.
The £450,000 study,
funded by the NHS Health Technology Assessment
programme, is the first large trial of community
rehabilitation and may provide an evidence base
in the future for some of the community based
programmes that are currently being established.
Follow-up of the 230 patients will continue for
a further 18 months. Early results have shown
that those who tended to be depressed were less
likely to complete the rehabilitation.
|
