The current status of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease awareness, treatments, and plans for improvement in South Korea: a narrative review

Abstract

The prevalence of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) is high in South Korea which has remained virtually unchanged over the past few years. Other challenges related to COPD in South Korea include a low level of awareness of COPD, underutilization of pulmonary function tests (PFTs) and a low level of inhaler use. Continued efforts have been made to raise awareness of COPD in the general public and promote screening tests for the early detection of COPD patients for high-risk patients, which should be the primary object for better management of the disease. The Korean Academy of Tuberculosis and Respiratory Diseases (KATRD) and the Korea Disease Control and Prevention Agency (KDCA) have been working in tandem on numerous projects to resolve these issues. As the fruit of these efforts, a couple of projects are currently being carried out to add PFTs into the National Health Examination (NHE) of Korea as part of screening tests and improve the quality of COPD treatments in primary care settings. Raising public awareness of a chronic disease such as COPD requires collective efforts of academic societies and government. In addition, personalized education programs that are tailored to individual COPD patients is a necessity to raise adherence of treatment and self-management of COPD. The aim of this manuscript is to report the current status of COPD management in South Korea in hopes that it will help better treat and manage COPD in other nations coping with similar challenges.

Development of a daily predictive model for the exacerbation of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease

“…In general, approximately 75% of COPD patients remain undiagnosed because most of them are less symptomatic 28 . Likewise, only less than 5% of individuals are reported to visit and treated for COPD in South Korea 29 . Most of these less symptomatic patients that hardly voluntarily visit hospital, thus it is difficult to find these group of individuals.…”

Prevalence, characteristics, and risk of exacerbation in young patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease

“…In conclusion, we found 4.2% of individuals aged 40–50 years had COPD through the KNHNES survey which provides us a chance to evaluate asymptomatic, mild COPD in young individuals. Considering the high rate of under-diagnosed COPD in Korea [ 36 ], our results may also have the possibility of under-estimation. Although we did not find significant differences in exacerbation risk or healthcare cost between non-COPD and COPD groups of young individuals, there were trends of increased exacerbation risk in COPD young patients irrespective of smoking status.…”

Lack of Association between Inhaled Corticosteroid Use and the Risk of Future Exacerbation in Patients with GOLD Group A Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease

“…Indeed, the prevalence of COPD in South Korea ranged from 13.1% to 14.6% between 2010 and 2015. However, only less than 5% visited hospitals for the management of COPD [ 52 ]. We speculate that most of the GOLD Group A patients remain undiagnosed as they are asymptomatic or mildly symptomatic, and rarely visit clinics.…”