Broderick J, et al. – A scrutiny was performed of the influence of obesity on outcomes of exercise capacity and disease impact in patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), in response to pulmonary rehabilitation (PR). This study also pursued a comparison of its outcomes to those of normal weight and overweight counterparts. It was deduced that the exercise capacity and self–report disease impact of individuals with COPD exhibited an improvement, similarly in response to PR regardless of the body mass index (BMI).

Methods

• The scheme of this trial was secondary data analysis of clinical database.
• It was conducted at the St. James’s Hospital, Dublin, Ireland.
• The enrollment included 155 individuals with a primary diagnosis of COPD who completed a PR programme between 2012 and 2014.
• The main measure comprised of the analysis of exercise capacity via the Six Minute Walk Test (6MWT) and the COPD Assessment Test (CAT) analyzed the disease impact.

Results

• A prominent improvement was noted in the walking distance in the 6MWT [mean difference of 54.8 m (95% CI: 41.5, 68.2; p < .001)] and similarly [F(2, 92) = 1.434, p = .24] across all BMI categories.
• However, the level of improvement reached clinical importance in the normal/underweight and overweight categories only.
• Disease impact on the CAT score appeared to improve across all body mass index (BMI) classifications by 2.3 points (95% CI: 0.9, 3.6; p < .05) which reached clinical importance.
• It did not differ across BMI categories [F(2, 80) = 0.534, p = .58].