PATS: 10th Lund Symposium on 'Changing the Course of COPD'

The latest issue of Proceedings of the American Thoracic Society (volume 8, issue 4) contains proceedings from the 10th Annual Lund Symposium, which was the last in the series of events supported by AstraZeneca in Lund, Sweden.

The meeting, which has been held annually since 2000, examined a variety of topics, including COPD exacerbations, lung development, and the shared features between COPD and two other conditions that affect patients with COPD more commonly than might be expected, lung cancer and heart disease. This issue of PATS reviews the proceedings from the December 2010 symposium, highlighting various approaches designed to change the course of COPD diagnosis and treatment.

“The consensus among attendees, many of whom looked forward to regularly attending the program, is that the series has done much to expand the approach to COPD that has evolved over the last decade,” said symposium chairs Stephen I. Rennard, MD, of the University of Nebraska Medical Center, Jørgen Vestbo, DrMedSci, of the University of Manchester, and Rose Maciewicz, PhD, of AstraZeneca, in their introduction. “Like its predecessors, the 2010 conference drew speakers and discussants with diverse interests, and led to lively discussions of novel approaches to the problems of COPD.”

Among the topics researchers discuss in the proceedings are patient phenotyping, disease biomarkers, early detection, pharmacotherapeutic approaches, risk factors, targeting lung repair and regeneration, and treating COPD’s systemic effects. To read the issue in full, please visit http://pats.atsjournals.org.