Prognostic influence of prior chronic obstructive pulmonary disease in patients admitted for the first time because of acute heart failure: reply

Excerpt

We would like to thank Siniorakis et al. for the interest in our study [1] and their interesting comments [2]. Our study explores the role of a prior diagnosis of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) in a little studied group of patients—those experiencing a first episode of acute heart failure (AHF). For these patients (in a presumed early stage of their HF) we find that the presence of a prior COPD diagnosis is frequent and carries a higher risk of 1-year mortality or readmission. We believe that this information should raise concerns and lead to the designing of prospective studies in this group of patients. Since ours was a retrospective study, we were unable to report in detail data on the prior evaluation and treatment of our patients’ COPD, as already stated in the limitations section of the article [1]. …