Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease kills at a rate that exceeds prostate and breast cancer and is statistically comparable to heart failure, according to a national health records analysis presented as a late-breaking abstract at the European Respiratory Society Congress in Barcelona. The comparison challenges how health systems and patients rank the seriousness of a common lung disease.
The finding matters most to a specific group of American households: the roughly 11 million adults living with diagnosed COPD, their caregivers, and the families of people whose chronic cough or breathlessness has been treated as an inconvenience rather than a life-limiting condition.
