Article Sidebar
Article Details
Articles published in the Ghana Medical Journal may not be published elsewhere without the consent of the publishers. Request for consent for reproduction of material published in the Ghana Medical Journal should be addressed to the Editor-in-Chief. The publisher of this Journal reserves the right of copyright of all articles published in the Journal. It should also be understood by all authors that articles approved for publication in the journal are also deemed for publication online by the publisher.
Ghana Medical Journal is an Open Access journal and applies the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (Creative Commons Attribution License) 4.0 International. See details on the Creative Commons website (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) to articles and other content published in the Journal.
Main Article Content
Risk factors for chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) in a tertiary health institution in Lagos, Nigeria
Abstract
Objective: To describe the clinical characteristics and identifiable risk factors for Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) in a real-world clinical setting.
Design: Cross-sectional study among patients with COPD.
Setting: The Respiratory clinic of the Lagos University Teaching Hospital.
Participants: Consecutive patients with spirometry confirmed COPD on follow-up for ≥3 months. There were 79 participants.
Intervention: None
Main outcome measure: COPD risk factors, disease severity, comorbidities, and the severity of airflow limitation.
Results: The mean age of the participants was 63.3± 12.4 years, and 47 (59.5) were male. There was a high symptom burden (73.4% had COPD assessment test (CAT) score >10), 33 (41.8%) and 4 (5.1%) had GOLD 3 and GOLD 4 airflow limitation, respectively. Risk factors were identified for 96.2% of the participants: history of asthma in 37 (46.8%), tobacco smoking 22 (27.8%), occupational exposure 15 (19%), biomass exposure 5 (6.6%), post-tuberculosis 3 (3.8%), old age (3.8%), and prematurity 1 (1.3%). Fifty-nine (74.7%) had Asthma COPD Overlap (ACO). There were no significant associations between the risk factors and disease severity. Participants with ACO had lower lung function and a high frequency of allergic rhinitis.
Conclusion: Asthma was the most commonly identifiable risk factor for COPD, underscoring asthma risk reduction and management optimisation as priorities toward COPD burden mitigation. Future studies need to validate these findings and identify the predominant COPD phenotypes in our setting.
