|
|
||||||||||||||||||||||
© 2006 The American Thoracic Society Approaches to Improving Health Status in Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary DiseaseOne or Several?University Hospital Maastricht, Maastricht, The Netherlands Correspondence and requests for reprints should be addressed to Prof.dr. Emiel F.M. Wouters, M.D., Ph.D., Department of Respiratory Medicine, University Hospital Maastricht, P.O. Box 5800, 6202 Az Maastricht, The Netherlands. E-mail: e.wouters{at}lung.azm.nl ABSTRACT Health outcomes represent a broad group of endpoints used in clinical practice to assess the efficacy and effectiveness of interventions and to assess disease outcomes. Health status is one of the widely applied patient-reported health outcomes. The outcome of a variety of interventions, targeting local impairment or local airway inflammation, is evaluated by health status measurements; these global or summative outcomes indeed quantify the overall effect of a number of biological processes. Targeting the systemic compartment to improve health status is already widely applied in the domain of pulmonary rehabilitation. Challenging developments targeting systemic inflammation and biological processes related to systemic inflammation are particularly addressed in this review.
Key Words: outcome measures pulmonary rehabilitation systemic inflammation therapy
|
| |||||||||||||||||||||