Department of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine, Nanchang First Hospital, Nanchang University, Nanchang, 330000, Jiangxi, People's Republic of China.
Int J Chron Obstruct Pulmon Dis. 2021 Nov 25;16:3217-3228. doi: 10.2147/COPD.S338359. eCollection 2021.
Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) is a disease with high incidence rate and mortality rates worldwide. It is the third leading cause of death in the world. Nevertheless, little progress has been made in treating and preventing the disease. Under these circumstances, the concept of "early COPD" was proposed. Although this concept is not new, most health-care workers do not fully understand early COPD and tend to confuse it with mild COPD. In this review, we mainly discuss the definition of early COPD and the developmental trajectory of lung function. Although patients with early COPD have no symptoms, their lung function is already lower than that of normal people. A relatively complete definition is needed to identify this group of people. Reduced lung function is the diagnostic criterion for COPD, but lung development is a long-term dynamic process. In addition to smoking and air pollution, we should pay more attention to prenatal and childhood risk factors, for example, parents smoking, birth weight, preterm birth, mode of delivery, childhood respiratory infections and childhood asthma. Health-care workers need to be fully aware of early COPD, to reduce the morbidity of COPD and take effective measures to prevent these risk factors.
慢性阻塞性肺疾病（COPD）是一种在全球范围内发病率和死亡率都很高的疾病。它是世界上第三大致死原因。然而，在治疗和预防这种疾病方面几乎没有取得进展。在这种情况下，“早期 COPD”的概念被提了出来。尽管这个概念并不新鲜，但大多数医护人员并没有完全理解早期 COPD，并且容易将其与轻度 COPD 混淆。在这篇综述中，我们主要讨论了早期 COPD 的定义以及肺功能的发展轨迹。虽然早期 COPD 患者没有症状，但他们的肺功能已经低于正常人。需要一个相对完整的定义来识别这组人群。肺功能下降是 COPD 的诊断标准，但肺的发育是一个长期的动态过程。除了吸烟和空气污染，我们还应该更加关注产前和儿童时期的危险因素，例如父母吸烟、出生体重、早产、分娩方式、儿童呼吸道感染和儿童哮喘。医护人员需要充分认识到早期 COPD，以降低 COPD 的发病率，并采取有效措施预防这些危险因素。
