Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) is a progressive illness that causes breathing limitations due to active inflammation within the lungs. Currently, the disease affects 64 million people, and is the cause of 5% of all deaths in the 193 countries that work with the World Health Organization (WHO).
There is no cure for COPD. However there are two kinds of medications that help to treat some of the most typical symptoms. One of them are bronchodilators, which work to relax the muscles around the lungs, opening the airways, and making breathing easier. The other treatment option employs the use of inhaled corticosteroids (IC), whose function is to reduce airway inflammation, reducing swelling, and mucous, thus making it easier to breathe.
In spite of the treatment benefits associated with IC, the treatment also is said to give rise to the disabling of infection-fighting white blood cells. As a result, high doses and long periods of IC use have been associated with several systemic side-effects and complications, such as pneumonia, glaucoma, castrates, adrenal suppression, persistent infections, accelerated bone turnover and diabetes.
To clarify if the risk to develop pneumonia in COPD patients varies by the use of different IC agents, particularly fluticasone and budesonide, a group of scientists from the McGill University in Quebec designed a meta-analysis study. This new study involved a large, wide-ranging cohort of over 160,000 patients diagnosed with COPD, whose health information (prescription data over a 15 year period, average of 5) was accessed from the RAMQ database and processed, seeking to determine a correlation between the use of the treatment and increase pneumonia.
The study revealed that high and low doses of fluticasone in COPD diagnosed patients are associated with an increase risk of serious pneumonia. In contrast, when using budesonide as a treatment option, the time and doses prescribed do not increase the risk to develop pneumonia.
It is important to note that, due to the nature of the study, causation was not proven, since the study was not a randomized trial. However, the results that associate fluticasone with a significantly greater risk of pneumonia should be taken in consideration, especially when prescribing inhaled corticosteroids.
Comments are closed.