Ambulatory oxygen for people with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease who are not hypoxaemic at rest

Abstract

BACKGROUND: People with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) often become transiently hypoxaemic (low oxygen levels in blood) on exercise, necessitating oxygen therapy to improve breathlessness and exercise capacity and to reduce disability. Ambulatory oxygen therapy refers to provision of oxygen therapy during exercise and activities of daily living. Ambulatory oxygen therapy is often used by patients on long‐term oxygen therapy (LTOT) during exercise or by non‐LTOT users with or without resting hypoxaemia when they show evidence of exercise de‐saturation and demonstrate improvement in exercise capacity with supplemental oxygen. OBJECTIVES: To determine the longer‐term efficacy of ambulatory oxygen therapy only in patients with COPD who do not meet the criteria for LTOT, with respect to improvement in exercise capacity, mortality, quality of life and other relevant measures of improvement. SEARCH METHODS: The Cochrane Airways Group Specialised Register, including MEDLINE, EMBASE and CINAHL, was searched. Online clinical trial registers, including Controlled Clinical Trials (www.controlled‐trials.com), government registries (clinicaltrials.gov) and World Health Organization (WHO) registries (www.who.int/trialsearch), were screened for ongoing and recently completed studies. Bibliographies of included studies were searched for additional trials that may meet the inclusion criteria and were not retrieved by the above search strategy. Authors of identified trials were contacted to provide other published and unpublished studies. Searches were current as of November 2012. SELECTION CRITERIA: Randomised controlled trials (RCTs) that compare ambulatory oxygen therapy provided through portable oxygen cylinders/battery‐powered devices or liquid oxygen canisters versus placebo air cylinders, usual medical care or co‐intervention in study participants with COPD who did not meet criteria for LTOT. DATA COLLECTION AND ANALYSIS: We used standard methods as expected by The Cochrane Collaboration. MAIN RESULTS: Four ...