Malnutrition: The forgotten factor in COPD management?

Malnutrition affects up to 35% of individuals with Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) and is associated with poor patient outcomes and significant costs to the NHS. NICE guidelines provide recommendations for managing malnutrition in COPD¹ and more recently a multi-professional consensus guide; ‘Managing Malnutrition in COPD’² has been launched to provide practical advice to healthcare professionals. Despite this, malnutrition continues to go under-detected and under-treated in this group.

In this article, the author describes her experience of undertaking a project to implement a pathway to manage malnourished COPD patients in general practice.

COPD and Malnutrition

Disease-related malnutrition (DRM) affects 3 million people in the UK and is estimated to cost more than £23 billion each year.³