Does physician-diagnosed COPD increase the risk of major CVD events in a primary prevention cohort?
COPD is a significant risk factor for major CVD events in patients without prior CVD, conferring a risk comparable to diabetes and warranting aggressive primary prevention.
In a large real-world population without CVD, people with physician-diagnosed COPD were 25% more likely to have a major CVD event, after adjustment for CVD risk and other factors. This rate is comparable to the rate in people with diabetes and calls for more aggressive CVD primary prevention in the COPD population.
Maclagan et al. (Thu,) studied this question.