The number of hospital admissions for chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) has increased rapidly since 2010 in Canada, according to a study published online Sept. 11 in CMAJ, the journal of the Canadian Medical Association.
Joseph E. Amegadzie, Ph.D., from the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, and colleagues used a comprehensive national database of hospital admissions in Canada to identify those aged 40 years and older with a main discharge diagnosis of COPD. Sex-specific, age-standardized trends in annual rates of hospital admissions were calculated for COPD for younger (40 to 64 years) and older (≥65 years) adults.
A total of 1,134,359 hospital admissions were for COPD over 16 years. The researchers found that the total number of admissions increased by 68.8 percent between 2002 and 2017. There was a 30.0 percent increase observed in the overall crude admission rate (from 368 to 479 per 100,000 population) and a 9.6 percent increase in the sex- and age-standardized admission rate (from 437 to 479 per 100,000 population).
