COPD Assessment Test: A Review of Extant Literature

Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) is a major health burden worldwide. Reasons for poor management include lack of awareness regarding COPD among healthcare providers and patients, insufficient use of diagnostic tests (such as spirometry), poor treatment decisions. Another major issue is poor doctor-patient communication which can lead to inaccurate assessment of a patient's clinical picture. The COPD Assessment Test (CAT) is a clinical tool which provides a quantitative measure of the severity of a patient's symptoms and their pulmonary health status. It is a brief patient-filled questionnaire that only takes a few minutes to fill out. This has the potential to help bridge deficiencies in the clinical history that may be left by any communication gap between the patient and the physician. Various studies have investigated the effectiveness of CAT in clinical settings. Herein we review these studies to examine the sensitivity, validity and reliability of the CAT as a clinical diagnostic and assessment tool in light of the existing literature.