Mark Dransfield: breathing new ideas into COPD

Abstract

A new Lancet Commission report, Towards the Elimination of Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease, is not a comforting read. The Commission's account of the failure of respiratory medicine to make advances in chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) comparable to those seen in other common conditions, such as heart disease and cancer, will strike many readers as bleak. “It is bleak”, says Mark Dransfield, Professor of Pulmonary, Allergy and Critical Care Medicine at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB), AL, USA, Medical Director of its Lung Health Center, and a Co-Chair of this Commission.