NOVELTY frequent productive cough manuscript published

We are pleased to announce that a new article entitled ‘Frequent productive cough: Symptom burden and future exacerbation risk among patients with asthma and/or COPD in the NOVELTY study’ has been published in Respiratory Medicine.

Frequent productive cough is a newly proposed term to describe cough with sputum most/several days a week for the past 3 months, which is assessed using two items from the St George’s Respiratory Questionnaire. This article reports the prevalence of frequent productive cough, and the relationships with baseline disease characteristics and exacerbations in patients with asthma and/or COPD.

A video summary featuring the lead author, Dr Rod Hughes, global study physician for the NOVELTY study, discussing the article’s key findings is available below.

In this analysis, almost one third of patients with asthma and/or COPD had frequent productive cough, which was more common in asthma+COPD and COPD than asthma, and prevalence increased with higher physician-assessed severity. The presence of frequent productive cough was associated with reduced lung function and history of pollutant exposure at home/work in all diagnoses. Patients with frequent productive cough at baseline were at a greater risk of experiencing an exacerbation over the subsequent 12 months.

This work highlights how the frequent productive cough trait was present across asthma and/or COPD and that it represents an important indicator of adverse clinical outcomes. Further research into the underlying mechanisms of frequent productive cough is needed to support the development of targeted therapies.

The full article is available here.

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