An Observational Study to Asses the Echocardiographic Changes in Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease

Cardiovascular complications are frequent cause of morbidity and mortality in COPD. They are most profound and reproducible clinical findings associated with COPD. Roughly 30% of patients die from a cardiovascular complications. A better understanding of the association between COPD and cardiovascular complications should help improve the outcome, particularly if cardiovascular complications could be identified earlier and/or prevented. There are only few studies done in our country to assess the cardiovascular parameters in COPD. Previous echocardiographic studies in COPD present limitations because of their retrospective design, their reduced number of subjects, their partial echocardiographic analysis or their potential selection biases. To overcome these difficulties, we have prospectively explored COPD patients at a well -defined and relevant time -point of their clinical evolution, i. e. their first hospital admission due to an exacerbation, selecting them from the population admitted during a defined period of time and study is the representative of patients with clinically relevant COPD.