The efficacy of mass screening for chronic obstructive pulmonary disease using screening questionnaires in a medical health check-up population

Background: Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) is a preventable and treatable disease, highlighting the need for efficient screening strategies to identify patients with COPD. However, there is little evidence regarding the efficacy of mass screening for COPD, and no epidemiological studies on COPD have been conducted in the Shikoku region of Japan.
Methods: In this cross-sectional study, we originally investigated the efficacy of mass screening for COPD among community residents in the aforementioned region using two COPD screening questionnaires.
Results: From July 2018 through January 2019, 688 participants were enrolled. COPD was diagnosed using the Global Initiative for the Chronic Obstructive Lung Disease criteria. Twenty-one patients were newly diagnosed with COPD and 19 (90.5%) had early stages COPD. The prevalence of COPD in this study was 3.1%. The COPD Population Screener (COPD-PS) questionnaire and the International Primary Care Airways Guidelines (IPAG) questionnaire had extremely high negative predictive values in discriminating participants with COPD from those without. The scores of both questionnaires were correlated with spirometric tests and with each other. The COPD-PS questionnaire had significantly better specificity and area under the receiver operating characteristic curve value than the IPAG questionnaire. Moreover, only the COPD-PS questionnaire was identified as an independent factor for predicting COPD diagnosis in the multivariate analysis.
Conclusions: Mass screening for COPD using screening questionnaires, particularly the COPD-PS questionnaire, might be useful to identify the early stages of COPD in a medical health check-up population.

This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).