TY - JOUR T1 - Trends in population burden of copd: Actual facts or fallacies? AU - Bischoff EW, Crockett AJ, Schermer TJ Y1 - 2010/08/09 N1 - 10.1001/archinternmed.2010.259 JO - Archives of Internal Medicine SP - 1408 EP - 1410 VL - 170 IS - 15 N2 - In the time between submission and publication of the article,1 we have published COPD prevalence data from a primary care database in the Netherlands.2 The sex-stratified prevalence trends as reported by Gershon et al1 contradict our (and others’) findings: while their graphs show consistently higher prevalence rates in women, our 30-year trend study shows higher rates in men. Our data clearly show that women are catching up with men in terms of COPD prevalence (Figure), while the figures presented by Gershon et al1 show the exact opposite. Apart from an error in the male and female labeling in the graphs, we cannot think of a plausible explanation for the remarkable and divergent finding that COPD prevalence is higher in Canadian women. SN - 0003-9926 M3 - doi: 10.1001/archinternmed.2010.259 UR - http://dx.doi.org/10.1001/archinternmed.2010.259 ER -