Inhaled corticosteroids in Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD)

The use of inhaled corticosteroids is well established in asthma, but whether they exert a beneficial effect in smoking related chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) is less clear. There are suggestions that patients with COPD who have a disease with similarities to asthma, i.e. a good spirometric response to salbutamol and a pattern of airway inflammation with predominant eosinophils (a characteristic cell in asthma), will respond more favourably to ICS. In this study, we tested our hypothesis that COPD patients with features similar to asthma, i.e. bronchodilator reversibility and an airway eosinophilia would exhibit a better response to ICS. We assessed this using airway biopsies at the beginning and end of a six month ICS study.