ABSTRACT

Objective: To assess the frequency of gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD) among cases of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) at tertiary care Hospital.

Material and Methods: This cross-sectional study was conducted at medicine OPD at Liquate University of Medical and Health Sciences. Study duration was six months from March 2019 to August 2019. All the cases having age more than 18 years, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and either of gender were included. COPD was defined as the patients having ratio of forced expiratory volume in one second (FEVI) to forced vital capacity (FVC) less than 70% and having no improvement in forced expiratory volume (FEV) in one second after bronchodilator. All the information including frequency of GERD was collected through a performa. Data was analyzed by using SPSS version 20.

Results: The mean age of the cases was 49.34+34.12 years. Males were most common as 67(82.2%). As per COPD categorization, most of the cases (47.4%) had moderate COPD, followed by, 27.6% with mild, 18.4% with severe and 6.6% cases had very sever COPD. Overall GERD rate was 23.7% among COPD cases and the frequency was statistically insignificant as per severity of COPD (p-0.567).

Conclusion: Gastroesophageal reflux disease was found to be highly frequent among cases of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. It is thus suggested that each patient presenting with COPD, must be considered for GERD.

Keywords: COPD, GERD, severity