Stopped: Recruitment difficulties
Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) is a chronic lung disease affecting an estimated 1 in 10 Canadians. Symptoms include persistent shortness of breath, cough and sputum production. The symptoms can be serious when people with COPD experience a flare of their disease and may lead to hospitalization or death. Improving other conditions that affect COPD control is one way to improve the health of people with COPD. Obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) is the most common breathing problem during sleep, and commonly co-exists with COPD. Although diagnosing and treating OSA is encouraged, it has not been highlighted in guidelines that recommend ideal COPD care. People with COPD and OSA have lower sleep quality and lower oxygen levels during sleep compared to people with OSA. Despite these differences, treatment of OSA in people with COPD is modeled after treatment of OSA in the general population, generally using treatment with continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP) with the possible addition of oxygen through the CPAP machine. There are few studies looking at other types of treatment including noninvasive ventilation (NIV) in people with COPD and OSA. The majority of studies of NIV in COPD has been for people with other reasons to use NIV including acute respiratory failure or chronic hypercarbic respiratory failure and did not include people with risk factors for OSA or who had undergone overnight sleep studies. In Alberta, NIV is provided province wide for people who have both OSA who do not meet certain physiologic targets in their oxygen levels or breathing patterns after CPAP is applied on an overnight sleep study. NIV is provided preferentially to CPAP and oxygen, providing an opportunity to look at health outcomes when NIV is used instead of CPAP for the treatment of patients with COPD. Through this study, we will measure whether people with COPD and a sleep related breathing disorder such as OSA have fewer severe flares of COPD after starting CPAP or NIV. We will evaluate whether the number of Emergency Department visits, hospitalizations or deaths lowers after starting CPAP or NIV.
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Proportion of patients with moderate-severe exacerbations of COPD (Emergency Department visit for COPD) in the 2 years following initiation of CPAP or NIV compared to the 2 years prior
Timeframe: 2 years