PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - José Luis Izquierdo
AU  - José Miguel Rodríguez
AU  - Carlos Almonacid
AU  - María Benavent
AU  - Ramón Arroyo-Espliguero
AU  - Alvar Agustí
TI  - Real-life burden of hospitalizations due to COPD exacerbations in Spain
AID  - 10.1183/23120541.00141-2022
DP  - 2022 Jan 01
TA  - ERJ Open Research
PG  - 00141-2022
4099  - http://openres.ersjournals.com/content/early/2022/06/09/23120541.00141-2022.short
4100  - http://openres.ersjournals.com/content/early/2022/06/09/23120541.00141-2022.full
AB  - Patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) often suffer episodes of exacerbation of symptoms (ECOPD) that may eventually require hospitalization due to several, often overlapping, causes. We aimed to analyse the characteristics of patients hospitalized because of ECOPD in a real-life setting using a big-data approach. The study population included all patients older than 40 years with a diagnosis of COPD (n=69.359; prevalence 3.72%) registered since January 1st, 2011, until March 1, 2020, in the database of the public healthcare service (SESCAM) of Castilla-La Mancha (Spain) (n=1.863.759 subjects). We used natural language processing (Savana Manager v3.0) to identify those who were hospitalized during this period for any cause, including ECOPD. During the study 26.453 COPD patients (38.1%) were hospitalized (at least once). Main diagnoses at discharge were respiratory infection (51%), heart failure (38%) or pneumonia (19%). ECOPD was the main diagnosis at discharge (or hospital death) in 8.331 of them (12.0% of the entire COPD population and 31.5% of those hospitalized). In-hospital ECOPD-related mortality rate was 3.1%. These patients were hospitalized 2.36 times per patient, with a mean hospital stay of 6.1 days. Heart failure (HF) was the most frequent comorbidity in patients hospitalized because of ECOPD (52.6%). This analysis shows that, in a real-life setting, ECOPD hospitalizations are prevalent, complex (particularly in relation to HF), repetitive and associated with significant in-hospital mortality.FootnotesThis manuscript has recently been accepted for publication in the ERJ Open Research. It is published here in its accepted form prior to copyediting and typesetting by our production team. After these production processes are complete and the authors have approved the resulting proofs, the article will move to the latest issue of the ERJOR online. Please open or download the PDF to view this article.Conflicts of interest: All authors declare no conflicts of interest.