Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD)

Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) is a common inflammatory disease of the lungs, caused in particular by long-term smoking and resulting in breathing difficulties and other respiratory symptoms. Clinical trials in the past have focused on improving the lung function (breathlessness) or reducing the number of flare-ups (exacerbations) requiring hospital visits, resulting in a number of medications to treat these aspects of the disease.

Whilst there are a number of medications which help with the breathlessness and reduce exacerbations, COPD patients also suffer from other symptoms like chronic cough and excess mucus secretion, which greatly affect their lives and are poorly managed by the current therapies.

Whilst there are a number of medications which help with the breathlessness and reduce exacerbations, COPD patients also suffer from other symptoms like chronic cough and excess mucus secretion, which greatly affect their lives and are poorly managed by the current therapies. We have performed qualitative research analyzing social media and online community discussions to highlight the burden of cough and mucus for COPD patients, revealing that these symptoms can lead to disturbed sleep, fatigue, urinary incontinence and social anxiety/embarrassment. The current 5-country patient preference study with COPD patients is designed to show just how important these other symptoms are to patients, compared to breathlessness and exacerbations, and how important it would be to them to be able to alleviate these different consequences of their COPD.

Fact sheet

Therapeutic area	Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD)
Study led by	Novartis
PREFER leads team	Nigel Cook
MPLC decision point of interest	Input to phase III clinical trial design
PREFER case study acronym	COPD
Clinical objectives	Quantify the relative needs and preferences of COPD patients regarding symptoms, the impact on their QOL, and evaluate whether preferences vary with certain respondent characteristics.
Patients from	Five countries (US, UK, France, Australia, Japan) recruited through patient groups and supplemented through patient panels
Methods in Qualitative Study	Literature review, social media listening, online bulletin boards, qualitative in-depth telephone interviews
Methods in Quantitative Study	Discrete Choice Experiment (DCE) for the preferences elicitation Various PRO instruments and other questions also included in survey to enable sub-group analyses
End-date qualitative data collection	June 2019
End-date quantitative data collection	January 2020