Researchers say that pulmonary rehabilitation (PR) programmes for patients with moderate to severe chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) should include sleep assessment.
The recommendation comes after the team, from UC San Diego in California, USA, found that the proportion of COPD patients referred for PR who had sleep disordered breathing was much higher than in the general population.
“Pulmonary rehabilitation programs may provide unique platforms to incorporate measures of sleep assessment that could eventually benefit this highly selected group of patients”, Xavier Soler and colleagues write in the Annals of the American Thoracic Society.
The researchers studied 54 patients who had moderate or severe COPD (mean forced vital capacity 75.5 % predicted) who enrolled in their institution’s PR programme over a 2-year period.
Don't Forget To Breathe 