Symptom clusters in chronic obstructive pulmonary disease: A systematic review

To conduct a comprehensive literature review to identify symptom clusters commonly present in Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) patients.

COPD is the fourth leading cause of death worldwide. Substantial research has been studied regarding single symptoms that burden patients with this disease and the profound impacts that these symptoms can have on physical and psychological health. However, these symptoms rarely occur in isolation and limited research has been conducted identifying clinically significant relationships or clusters of symptoms associated with COPD afflicted patients.

PubMed, Web of Science, and Embase databases were used to identify potential articles limited to records published between 2005 and 2018 with human-conducted trials on adults with COPD, examining symptom clusters in this population. Only 5 studies met inclusion criteria.

Across the five studies, 596 participants were included with a mean age of 70.49. Two themes emerged including psychological symptom clusters and respiratory-related symptom clusters. Anxiety-related symptoms appeared to be a common theme among psychological symptom clusters and varied greatly based on instrument selection. Inconsistent results were found in respiratory-related symptom clusters, but included difficulty breathing as a common symptom component. Only one study examined for stability of symptoms over time.

There were inconsistent results across all studies which may be contributed to the heterogeneity amongst patients, instruments administered, and statistical approach. Future research should be conducted to further elucidate COPD related symptom clusters, their effects on somatic and cognitive health, and the stability of these symptom clusters over time.