Around two-thirds of the 3 million people in the UK with COPD do not know they have it. This evidence map will assess whether screening the general adult population for chronic obstructive pulmonary disease—the fifth leading cause of death in the UK—actually improves health, extends life, or helps people quit smoking. The UK National Screening Committee last reviewed the evidence in 2018 and found it insufficient to recommend screening: studies were small, inconsistent, and failed to show that diagnosis changed smoking behaviour or that treatments helped people with mild disease. This project will systematically catalogue all research published since then, asking two specific questions: whether screening improves health outcomes and whether it increases smoking cessation rates. If the map reveals strong new evidence that screening works, it could reshape national screening policy, leading to earlier diagnosis and treatment for hundreds of thousands of undiagnosed patients. If the evidence remains weak, the findings will spare the NHS the cost and effort of implementing a screening programme that does not deliver measurable benefit.
View original technical description
Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) is a group of lung diseases. In COPD, damage to the air passages in the lungs means that less air can pass into the lungs. The two main diseases covered by COPD are chronic bronchitis and emphysema. Together these are the fifth main cause of death in the UK. Around 3 million people in the UK have COPD, but around two-thirds of these people may not realise they have it. Smoking tobacco is the main cause of COPD. Screening people for COPD may mean it can be diagnosed and treated at an earlier stage. Tests for COPD might include breathing tests to measure how well the lungs work (such as spirometry), and questionnaires to ask patients about any difficulty breathing and whether they have ever smoked. When a patient is found to have COPD, the doctor will encourage them to stop smoking (if they smoke) and to have their vaccinations against flu and pneumonia, and may also prescribe medicines depending on how severe their COPD is. The UK National Screening Committee (UK NSC) last looked at the research evidence for screening for COPD in 2018. The report found that studies of screening for COPD included small numbers of patients, differed a lot in the type of patients and type of tests they looked at, and gave different results about how useful screening was. It was not clear from the available studies whether being screened or having a COPD diagnosis made people more likely to give up smoking. It was also unclear how useful medicines were for people with mild COPD. There were very few studies looking at whether people who had been screened for COPD were healthier or lived longer than people who had not been screened. The report concluded that there was not enough evidence to support screening for COPD at that time. This evidence map aims to summarise how much, and what type, of research evidence has been published since the previous report in 2018. This evidence map assesses two questions: 1) does screening for COPD improve people’s health or quality of life or enable them to live longer than people who have not been screened; 2) does screening for COPD make people more likely to give up smoking?
Plain English summaries and category classifications on this site are generated by AI and may not perfectly reflect the original research.
Is something wrong? Let us know