Predictive Ability of the Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) Assessment Test (CAT) for Acute Exacerbations (PACE) in Patients With COPD

Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) is a major health concern, with a substantial impact on a patient's life. However, the impact of COPD is currently under-recognised and, as a result, COPD is under-treated. An exacerbation of COPD is a major element that causes poor quality of life and loss of productivity. Therefore, minimizing the frequency of exacerbations is a short term treatment goal in COPD management and could improve Quality of Life (QoL) significantly in all severity groups of COPD. Although the use of spirometry for the determination of disease severity in COPD is supported by guidelines, a lung function test alone does not provide a measurement of the overall impact of COPD on health status and is not generally available especially in primary care centre. Therefore, a standardised and effective dialogue between patients and physicians in a consultation could address the impact of COPD on a patient's QoL in this situation. The COPD Assessment Test (CAT), recently launched in 2009, is a short and simple, self-administered questionnaire designed to assess the condition of patients and overall impact of COPD, and to improve patient-physician communication. It has been proven that the CAT has good repeatability and discriminative properties which suggest that it is sensitive to treatment effects at a group level. The CAT score with its better ability to assess the impact of COPD on patients, suggests potential to predict a significant change in COPD status such as acute exacerbations of COPD. Since the CAT is designed to assess the impact of COPD on the patient by measuring overall impairment, it has better correlations with other instruments, such as the Clinical COPD Questionnaire (CCQ), MRC (Medical Research Council) dyspnoea scale, St George's Respiratory Questionnaire (SGRQ),and the 6-minute walk test. However, it does not correlate well with FEV1 (Forced Expiratory Volume in One Second). While the CAT shares some similarities with other q