Publication:

Correlation of BMI and serum albumin with c-reactive protein in male patients with stable chronic obstructive pulmonary disease

Background There is growing consensus that chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), a chronic inflammatory disease of the airways and lung parenchyma is associated with low grade systemic inflammation even in stable COPD, which increases during acute exacerbation. It is still debated whether the inflammation is a spill-over from the lung or the lung bears the share of systemic inflammation in COPD. There is systemic manifestation in COPD which is responsible for its severity in individual cases, but it is not clearly known whether the systemic inflammation give rise to systemic manifestations.

Methods In this background we measured serum C-reactive protein (CRP) level in 53 stable COPD patients and 32 age/sex matched control without known ischemic heart disease (IHD)/ diabetes mellitus (DM)/ peripheral arterial disease and normal chest X-ray and tried to find out any correlation of serum CRP level (marker of systemic inflammation) with BMI and serum albumin (marker of nutritional abnormality).

Results The study found that serum CRP level was significantly higher in stable COPD patient in comparison to healthy control. (6.226±3.9 vs 1.31±0.53).Though serum CRP level did not significantly increase with increasing severity of the disease, but serum CRP level was significantly increased in COPD patients with low BMI and low serum albumin (9.10±3.14 vs 4.01±2.90 p value <0.001 and 8.51±3.5 vs 3.59±2.5 with p value <0.001 respectively for BMI and serum albumin).

Conclusions So, the study concluded that stable COPD is associated with increased systemic inflammatory markers than normal control, correlates significantly with nutritional parameters in COPD like BMI and serum albumin level and may be an indicator of malnutrition regardless of lung function impairment.