NOVELTY baseline characteristics manuscript published

We are pleased to announce that ‘Heterogeneity within and between physician-diagnosed asthma and/or COPD: NOVELTY cohort’ has been published in the European Respiratory Journal.

The article reports the baseline characteristics data of the global population of patients participating in the NOVELTY study. To accompany publication, a video summary featuring the lead author, Professor Helen Reddel, discussing the article’s key findings and their implications for the clinical identification and treatment of patients with asthma and/or COPD is available below.

Clinical studies typically focus on asthma and COPD separately, limiting our understanding of disease mechanisms and treatment options. Conversely, NOVELTY is a global, 3-year, prospective observational study of patients with asthma and/or COPD from real-world clinical practice.

Within this NOVELTY cohort, we identified marked heterogeneity within – and overlap between – baseline characteristics across the physician-assigned diagnosis and physician-assessed severity groups. This heterogeneity and overlap were observed for clinical, physiological and biomarker characteristics between patients with asthma, asthma+COPD and COPD. Symptoms, health-related quality of life, lung function and exacerbations were higher with greater physician-assessed severity, yet some patients with mild disease had features associated with poor outcomes.

This work highlights the potentially substantial heterogeneity between diagnosis and severity groups in asthma and/or COPD, demonstrating that conventional diagnostic and existing severity classifications in clinical practice poorly differentiate between clinical phenotypes. As such, disease severity in asthma and/or COPD could be better measured through patient experiences and perceptions in terms of their clinical disease burden and healthcare utilisation than their physician-assigned diagnostic label or physician-assessed severity. Treatment strategies for patients with obstructive lung disease such as asthma and COPD should be targeted towards individual characteristics and disease traits rather than their diagnostic label to improve patient outcomes.

The full article is available here.

Read a summary of this article and other NOVELTY publications and presentations here.