Clinical Usefulness of Long-Term Oxygen Therapy in Adults

The fact that we all need oxygen to survive might make the benefit of supplemental oxygen in hypoxemia seem obvious. It is not. Long-term oxygen therapy was the first treatment to improve prognosis in patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and chronic severe hypoxemia.1,2 However, the question of whether long-term oxygen therapy is beneficial in moderate hypoxemia has been floating in the air.The literature on the efficacy of long-term oxygen therapy requires no librarian. The current indications for its use are based on two unblinded, randomized trials that were conducted in the 1970s and involved a total . . .