Participation in pulmonary rehabilitation in routine clinical practice.

Background And Aims: Denmark offers COPD rehabilitation to enable patients to tackle the consequences of COPD, but only a minority of the patients complete these programs. To increase the completion rate, an follow-up study was performed, to characterize COPD patients and to identify potential differences between those who complete and those who do not complete rehabilitation or do not even get a rehabilitation offer in daily clinical routine.

Methods: In- and out COPD-patients who participated in baseline tests were compared in terms of completion of rehabilitation, drop-out, and no rehabilitation offer.

Does pulmonary rehabilitation work in clinical practice? A review on selection and dropout in randomized controlled trials on pulmonary rehabilitation.

Aim: To analyze randomized controlled trials (RCTs) on pulmonary rehabilitation (PR) to determine whether the patients who complete PR form a representative subset of the chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) target population and to discuss what impact this may have for the generalizability and implementation of PR in practice.

Material And Methods: A review of 26 RCTs included in a Cochrane Review 2007. We analyzed the selection at three different levels: 1) sampling; 2) inclusion and exclusion; 3) and dropout.