MedWire News: Pulmonary rehabilitation (PR) may help improve smoking cessation rates in patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), results from a Canadian study indicate.

Speaking at the Chest 2009 meeting in San Diego, California, USA, lead researcher Emilie Chan-Thim (Concordia University, Montreal, Quebec) explained: “The inclusion of smokers in PR is often debated. However, the role of PR as an aid to smoking cessation has been much less considered.”

To investigate, Chan-Thim and team studied 413 smokers with COPD who were receiving treatment at the Hôpital du Sacré-Coeur de Montréal. All the participants had baseline carboxyhemoblogin (HbCO) levels of at least 2%, indicating active smoking status.

The participants were randomly assigned to receive PR (n=27) or usual care without PR (n=386).

After an average follow-up of 31 months, 81.5% of patients in the PR group had a final HbCO value of less than 2%, suggesting at least short-term abstinence from smoking, compared with just 46% of those in the non-PR group.

Furthermore, 37% of patients in the PR group had two or more consecutive HbCO measurements of less than 2% during follow-up, suggesting sustained smoking cessation, compared with just 8% of those in the usual care group.

“The present findings suggest that patients who participate in a structured PR program achieve higher abstinence rates than those who receive usual care,” concluded Chan-Thim.

She added: “Results from this preliminary study suggest that PR may play a role as an aid to smoking cessation in COPD patients. Future well-designed intervention studies are needed to confirm these findings.”

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