Does COPD severity stage change comorbidities pattern?

Aim: Estimation of the difference in frequency and type of comorbidities in patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), grouped by COPD severity stages according to the Global Initiative for Chronic Obstructive Lung Disease (GOLD), from 1 to 4. The data subjects and methods: This study included 168 COPD patients with an equal share of patients in each GOLD stage (GOLD I 47 subjects, GOLD II 43, GOLD III 41 and GOLD IV 37 subjects). All data subjects, 106 men and 62 women (median age 66), were processed according to the successive arrival at the Clinical Center for Pulmonary Diseases Jordanovac, University Hospital Center Zagreb, for their medical examination. Results: The most common comorbidities were cardiovascular diseases with 60.1%, regardless of the GOLD stage. These are followed by pneumonia in 25.6% of COPD patients, anxiety and depression in 16.1%, diabetes in 12.5% and osteoporosis in 11.9% of the COPD patients. The most frequent malignant disease was the urinary bladder cancer. The share of the patients who suffered from pneumonia is consistently increasing with the severity of GOLD stages. Conclusion: The average number of comorbidities in GOLD I stage was 1.5, in GOLD II stage 1.8, GOLD III stage 2.1 and in GOLD IV stage 1.7. This suggests that the difference in the number of comorbidities according to the GOLD stages could be significant. This preliminary result was confirmed by a statistical chi-squared test with a significance level of 5% ( α = 0.05), whereas the difference in the types of comorbidities according to the GOLD stages was not statistically significant.