
Giving a COPD patient an inhaler is only part of the battle when it comes to treating the condition. According to two new articles published in the July 2024 issue of Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Diseases: The Journal of the COPD Foundation, increased education on proper inhaler use is needed to improve outcomes.
In the first article, “Prevalence of Critical Errors and Insufficient Peak Inspiratory Flow in Patients Hospitalized With COPD in a Department of General Internal Medicine,” researchers looked at how often inhalers are misused by patients hospitalized with COPD by studying patients over the course of nine months at Fribourg Hospital in Switzerland. The researchers categorized inhaler misuse as either a critical error in inhalation technique or insufficient peak respiratory flow. Both errors result in a smaller dose of medication reaching the patient’s lungs.
“Misuse of inhalers is common, and in our study, we found that approximately two-thirds of inhalers were misused,” Gael Grandmaison, MD, assistant physician in internal medicine at Fribourg Hospital, said in a news release. “If an inhaler was misused, a physiotherapist conducted up to three teaching sessions with the patient. These sessions helped reduce the number of critical errors in inhaler use. However, despite this education, more than one in 10 inhalers continued to be used sub-optimally, either due to an inability to generate sufficient inspiratory effort or because the inhaler was unsuitable for the patient’s characteristics. These results highlight the importance of regular therapeutic education, assessing the patient’s ability to generate a sufficient inspiratory effort and selecting an inhaler suited to the patient’s characteristics.”
In the second article, “Real-World Use of Inhaled COPD Medications: the Good, the Bad, the Ugly,” the author discusses the high cost of inhaler-based therapies and the problems associated with misuse, which are often because of the intricacies and multiple steps required to use the inhaler.
“Education is key to increasing the effectiveness of inhaled medications, and many clinicians — and often the patients themselves — are unaware that patients are having difficulty getting enough medications into their lungs,” author Valerie Pres, MD, MPH, associate professor of medicine at the University of Chicago, said in a release. “Additional inhaler technique education is needed to ensure patients are using the device correctly, especially when multiple inhaled medications are prescribed.”