HealthDay Reporter
WEDNESDAY, Oct. 26, 2016 (HealthDay News) — A new study says that oxygen therapy may not help people in the less severe stages of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD).
COPD is an umbrella term for the lung diseases chronic bronchitis and emphysema. The study findings could change clinical practice, the researchers added.
In 2014, close to 16 million Americans said they’d been diagnosed with COPD, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The disease stands as the third-leading cause of death in the United States.
One common treatment for COPD is supplemental oxygen — with both portable and at-home devices.
The therapy has been proven to prolong the lives of COPD patients with severe decreases in their blood oxygen levels, said study corresponding author Dr. Robert Wise.
What’s been unclear, he said, is whether it benefits patients with moderately low oxygen levels — either when they’re at rest or when they exert themselves.
The study findings were published Oct. 27 in the New England Journal of Medicine.
“No one has really known,” agreed Dr. Magnus Ekstrom, a respiratory medicine specialist at Lund University in Sweden. “During all this time, and despite the fact that we are talking about something as basic and common in everyday respiratory practice as supplemental oxygen.”
Ekstrom, who wrote an editorial published with the new study, said the findings are something doctors and COPD patients should discuss.
For the study, Wise and his colleagues randomly assigned 738 COPD patients to receive supplemental oxygen or not. All of the patients had moderately low oxygen levels in their blood — either persistently or when they were physically active.
Over the next six years, there was no evidence that the oxygen-therapy group fared any better.
It did not improve patients’ quality of life, forestall hospitalization or lengthen their lives, the researchers found.
Why? It’s not clear from this study, according to Wise, a professor of medicine at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine’s Division of Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine in Baltimore.
But, he said, it appears that the harmful effects of low blood oxygen may only arise at a certain threshold. So COPD patients with moderately low levels may not have much to gain from supplemental oxygen.
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