What is important to patients during a COPD exacerbation?

Development of a core outcome set (COS) for the management of Acute Exacerbations of Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease. The COS-AECOPD ERS Task Force

Do you suffer from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) or emphysema?

Do you care for someone suffering from COPD or emphysema?

Your experiences and views are crucial to our research project!

This survey is organized by the European Respiratory Society and the European Lung Foundation.

Please help us to understand what factors are important to patients and the people caring for them during an exacerbation or flare-up of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD).

This survey aims to improve the design and quality of future clinical trials (research studies).

When new treatments are developed, they are tested in clinical trials to make sure they work and are safe. Researchers don’t always use the same criteria (which are called outcomes) to test new treatments.  An outcome in a study testing a new treatment for COPD may be a measurement of how breathless you feel after taking the treatment.

Some outcomes provide more useful information than others. Because the types of outcomes used can change between trials it can be difficult to understand what some trials have found out. And it is hard to compare the findings from one trial with another. This can make it difficult to tell if the new treatments work or if they are safe.

With this survey we want to find the most important outcomes for these trials. We will then ask all future clinical trials to use these outcomes.

We appreciate this is a difficult time for patients and professionals in the respiratory community. While all efforts should rightly be focused on caring for those affected by COVID-19, we believe that research to improve care and outcomes for respiratory patients is needed now more than ever. For this reason, we would very much appreciate your participation in this survey.

The survey is available in the following languages:

• English

• Danish

• German

• Greek

• Hungarian
• Italian
• Mandarin
• Portuguese
• Russian
• Spanish

Thank you for your participation.