POINT: Should Chest CT Be Part of Routine Clinical Care for COPD? Yes

[摘要] To appreciate the value of CT imaging for routine care of patients with COPD it is best to start by considering the limits of such technology. CT scanning provides exquisite in vivo assessments of organ structure, and from these data we can extract subjective and objective features such as parenchymal remodeling, airway dilation, and vascular calcification. These features can be used to detect disease, stratify its severity, and predict its clinical course, but their presence or absence will generally not affect decisions to initiate, titrate, or switch many of the commercially available long-acting muscarinic antagonists, long-acting β₂-agonists, and inhaled steroids.

[学科分类] 呼吸医学