الفهرس 
INTRODUCTIONOnly 14 pages are availabe for public view
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Abstract
Asthma COPD overlap (ACO) occurs when patient has symptoms of both bronchial asthma and COPD. The diagnosis should be considered in patient of age ≥ 35 years, smoker or ex-smoker (≥ 10 packs/y), FEV1L/ FVC post BDT ˂ 0.7, FEV1 BDT ≥ 15% and 400 ml and or eosinophil blood count ≥300 cell/mm3 according to the criteria of SEPAR.
There are 2 hypothesis that have been suggested to explain the mechanism of overlapping: the “Dutch hypothesis” suggests that bronchial asthma and COPD have the same disease processing and bronchial asthma leading to the occurrence of COPD across the aging process, while the “British hypothesis” proposes that bronchial asthma and COPD are different diseases created by different mechanisms. Here both diseases are present separately in the same patient.
The aim of the current work is to assess the prevalence of ACO in COPD patients.
The present study included 80 COPD patients diagnosed according to GOLD criteria. All patients were subjected to history taking, clinical examination, routine laboratory investigation, induction of sputum for differential sputum cell count and sputum biomarker NGAL.
Seventeen patients were diagnosed as ACO among the all 80 COPD patients, with a prevalence of21.3%.Thus, the studied patients were subdivided into two groups: group A(ACO), group B(C0PD)
Sixteen patients of ACO were males and one patient was female. Among COPD patients62 were males and one patient was female. The age of ACO was with a mean of 58.76 ± 8.34years,while the mean of age of COPD patients was 60.75 ± 8.87 years. There was no statistically significant difference between the two studied groups regarding age and gender( p =0.411, p =0.382) respectively.
Among ACO patients, the mean of smoking index( pack/y) was 37.28 ± 26.34 and it was 53.58 ± 60.18 in COPD patients with no statistically significant difference between the two studied groups. (p= 0.491)