Respiratory Disease Cohort Studies of Chinese Medicine for Chronic Obstructive Pulmoriary Disease (RESEARCH-COPD)

Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) is a common chronic respiratory disease with high prevalence, high mortality rate, high disability rate and heavy disease burden, seriously endangering people's health. The prevalence of COPD among people aged 40 and above in China is 13.7%, with nearly 100 million patients. The situation of high prevalence, high mortality, and high disability is not matched by the low awareness rate, low lung function test rate, and low treatment rate, which is a serious situation for prevention and control. 2021 edition of 'Global Initiative on Chronic Obstructive Lung Disease (GOLD)' puts forward the concept of pre-COPD, which indicates that the concept of prevention and treatment of COPD has begun to change to prevention and early intervention, and is also related to the concept of intermediate medicine. The concept of pre-COPD has been proposed in the 2021 edition of GOLD, indicating that the concept of prevention and treatment of COPD has begun to shift towards prevention and early intervention, which is also in line with the idea of 'treating the disease before it is diagnosed' in TCM. Chinese medicine has certain advantages in the prevention and treatment of COPD. Currently, there is a lack of TCM diagnostic and treatment protocols for the early stage of COPD, and TCM diagnostic and treatment protocols for the stable stage of COPD need to be optimised. Therefore, based on the Chinese COPD registry management system, this study took the pre-CPD population and stable stage patients as the research object, and used the standardised use of Chinese medicine diagnostic and treatment protocols as the exposure factor to carry out a multicentre prospective cohort study, with a follow-up of 2 years, using the morbidity rate, the rate of decline in lung function FEV1, etc., to evaluate the efficacy of Chinese medicine diagnostic and treatment protocols for pre-COPD, and using the rate of occurrence of acute exacerbation, The efficacy of TCM treatment protocols for patients with stable COPD was further evaluated using the incidence of acute exacerbation and quality of survival. This will provide high-quality evidence-based medical evidence for the prevention and treatment of COPD by TCM.