OBJECTIVES : Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) refers to a group of progressive lung diseases that cause airflow blockage and breathing-related problems. It is the third leading cause of death in the United States. COPD often co-exists with multiple comorbidities which impact the quality of life, and furthermore, complicates management of the disease. The main objective of the present study was to evaluate COPD patients, their demographics, and presence of comorbid conditions.

METHODS : This retrospective study examined data from a U.S. electronic health record database (Cerner Health Facts®). All visits involving adult patients (≥ 18 years) with an ICD-9/10 diagnosis for COPD between 2014 and 2017 were analyzed. Comorbid conditions were characterized by corresponding ICD9/10 diagnosis codes following a medical review of the EHR data.

RESULTS : The study included 998,912 patients with COPD with a total of 2.7M (45% male vs. 55% female) patient visits. It was observed that the highest percentage of COPD patients were in the age group of ‘>65 years’ (53.1%), compared to 44.3% in the ‘36-65 years’ age group and 2.6% in the ‘18-35 years’ age group. Within visits where race was specified, majority were Caucasian (81.3%), followed by African-American (12.2%), Asian/Pacific Islander (0.9%), and Hispanic (0.1%). Given the major phenotypes of COPD, 17.2% of the visits had a diagnosis of chronic bronchitis, 9% had emphysema, while the majority had other forms of COPD (77.8%). The most prevalent comorbid conditions among COPD patients were depression (9.8%), pneumonia (7.8%), respiratory infections (4.3%), lung cancer (2.7%), and pulmonary hypertension (2.1%).

CONCLUSIONS : This retrospective analysis examined EHR data from a large COPD patient cohort to better understand real-world patient characteristics as well as comorbidities. Identification of these characteristics can potentially help develop new strategies to treat COPD patients.