Chest
Clinical InvestigationsCOPDBody Mass Index and the Risk of COPD
Section snippets
Study Population
The BLSA was started in 1958 as a long-term multidisciplinary study of normal human aging conducted by the intramural research program of the National Institute on Aging. The open-panel study continuously recruits community-dwelling volunteers, predominantly from the Washington-Baltimore area.11 In 1978, women began enrolling in the BLSA. The BLSA study participants are generally well educated and in good health at entry into the study. All participants give written informed consent as approved
Participant Characteristics
Table 1 shows the characteristics of the final study group by gender. At baseline, the men ranged in age from 40 to 73.2 years (mean age, 53.1 years) and the women ranged in age from 40 to 73.5 years (mean age, 55.5 years). On average, the men had higher BMI, were better educated, and had a larger proportion of smokers than the women. After a mean follow-up of 10.2 years for the men and 6.4 years for the women, the proportion of participants with COPD was lower in women than in men (3.6% vs
Discussion
The major finding of this study is that middle-aged and older men with low body weight, as measured by BMI, are at a substantially higher risk of COPD developing even after adjusting for other potential risk factors, including cigarette smoking, age, FEV1 percent predicted, abdominal obesity, and educational status. The inverse relationship between baseline BMI and the incidence of COPD is in agreement with the results of Higgins et al19 from the Tecumseh Community Health Study, who reported
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The authors thank Denis Muller, Susheel Patil, and Christopher Morrell for their comments; Neil Gittings for assistance with the data sets; and Melvyn Tockman and Edward Billips for help with the study.
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