Until recently, the nonproportional Venn diagram of OLD produced for the 1995 ATS guidelines had not been quantified. Soriano et al analyzed data from the US National Health and Nutrition Examination (NHANES) III survey (1988 to 1994) and the UK General Practice Research Database for the year 1998. The areas of intersection among the three OLD conditions (ie, CB, emphysema, and asthma) produced seven mutually exclusive disease Viagra Australia groups. Concomitant diagnosis of asthma, CB, or emphysema was common among OLD patients from the general population, particularly in adults aged > 50 years. We aimed to quantify the proportion of the general population with OLD, and the intersections of physician-diagnosed asthma, CB, and emphysema in two Italian general population samples, in relationship with airflow obstruction as determined through spirometry.
Materials and Methods
Data were collected during the second cross-sectional survey of the two prospective studies carried out in the rural area of the Po delta from 1988 to 1991 (2,841 subjects; age range, 8 to 75 years) and in the urban area of Pisa from 1991 to 1993 (2,841 subjects; age range, 8 to 97 years). Both surveys were performed using the same standard protocol already described in previous articles. A brief description is reported below.
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For each subject, information on respiratory symptoms, diseases, and risk factors were obtained by a standardized interviewer-administered questionnaire, developed by the Italian National Research Council based on that of the US National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute. The questionnaire contains 67 main questions covering demography, general health status, respiratory symptoms, respiratory diseases, allergy symptoms, family history of respiratory and allergic diseases, tobacco smoking, occupational history, environmental and socioeconomic conditions, and recent infectious episodes. Each interviewer was adequately trained prior to administering the survey. Similar to the NHANES III, subjects were defined as having CB/emphysema and asthma if they answered positively to the questions, “Have you ever been told you have CB (emphysema)?” and “Have you ever had asthma or asthmatic bronchitis?,” and also have reported physician confirmation.