Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) is currently the third leading cause of death in the United States, and morbidity and mortality from COPD continue to rise. Despite the magnitude of the problem, therapeutic options are limited - particularly in comparison to cardiovascular disease. Smoking cessation is essential to the treatment and prevention of COPD. However, although smoking is the principal cause of COPD, only a minority of smokers develops symptomatic COPD and many former smokers develop COPD years to decades after they have stopped smoking. The only other medical intervention proven to reduce mortality from COPD is supplemental oxygen therapy. There is therefore an urgent need for newer understandings of the pathophysiology of COPD and emphysema that might lead to the development of better therapies for COPD.
MESA-Lung is ancillary of the ongoing Multi-Ethnic Study of Atherosclerosis (MESA). MESA-lung will utilize the various existing measures of endothelial function that have been already been collected in MESA (flow-mediated dilatation \[FMD\] and related biomarkers and gene polymorphisms) to test the hypotheses that the endothelial dysfunction occurs in the clinical COPD.
