Phenotypic comparison of glucose and cardiac physiology of biomass fuel induced and smoking induced COPD

There is paucity of knowledge on how physiology of systemic parameters used in predicting metabolic syndrome differs in Biomass-fuel smoke induced COPD (BF-COPD) and smoking- COPD (SM-COPD). Aim: To evaluate and compare glucose and cardiovascular (CVS) physiology of BF-COPD and SM-COPD. Methods: Physician and spirometry diagnosed, age and severity matched, 43 SM-COPD and 23 BF-COPD underwent blood pressure estimation, ECG and glucose tolerance test. Descriptive statistics were used to estimate prevalence rates and parametric test were used to compare the means (SD). Results: In glucose physiology, diabetes (DM) diagnosed in accordance to fasting glucose was 8.7% in BF-COPD versus 2.3%in SM-COPD. DM diagnosed in accordance to post-glucose test was 19.0% in BF-COPD versus 2.5% in SM-COPD. Impaired glucose tolerance (IGT) test was 14.3% in BF-COPD versus 27.5% in SM-COPD. Fasting glucose levels >100mg/dl was 34.8% in BF-COPD versus 23.3% in SM-COPD. In CVS physiology BF-COPD had higher ECG measured mean heart rate (HR) and Qtc interval versus SM-COPD [HR: 85.6(12.1) beats/min vs 78.6(13.5) beats/min, p=0.04; Qtc: 453.6(35.5) vs 418.7(25.3); p 0.05). Conclusion: In the preliminary analysis of ongoing study BF-COPD tends to have higher prevalence of DM and glucose component of metabolic syndrome, while, SM-COPD tends to have more IGT, which were greater than what has been reported from India. There were also differences in HR and Qtc interval amongst the COPD phenotypes; however, which could be due to unequal gender distribution.